Ubajara?
The Tunnel of the Phoenicians in Brazil
Text by Pablo Villarrubia Mauso
Some places of the Brazilian North and Northeast
show signs that, according to some scholars, can prove the presence of the
Phoenicians in our country around 1.100 B.C.
Could it be that the Phoenicians had been in South
America, more specifically, in the North of Brazil? What would seem for orthodox
archaeologists to be a remote hypothesis was not so for the Austrian explorer
Ludwig Schwennhagen. Ludwig believed that the Seven Cities, in the state of Piauí,
was a stronghold of the Phoenicians some aboriginal confederations.
I decided to follow in the steps of the Austrian
scholar through the sands of the desert of Ceará. There a great oasis, stuck in
the mountain range called Sierra Ibiapaba, 330 kilometers from the city of
Fortaleza. It is the location of the National Park of Ubajara, the last area of
native Atlantic forest in the northeast of the country. I arrived at the town of
Ubajara in a bus, out of the city of Teresina, state of Piauí, over some 300
kilometers of distance.
When I got down off the bus, I saw myself encircled
by a multitude of goats that grazed calmly through the streets of the city. A
few meters away, the large statue of an indian was erected inside of a canoe
with his paddle.
Less than five kilometers from the town, one finds
the entrance of the National Park (the smallest one in Brazil, only 563
Brazilian hectares large). From a lookout point, the flattened sierras replete
with vegetation may be observed, contrasting with the dryness of the plains
regions. Right near the edge of the abyss, there is
a teleferic cable that goes down some 420 meters and leads the passengers to the
entrance of a great cave.
I looked for another way to get to the cave, a little
more difficult but more interesting- I hiked five kilometers through a jungle
short cut and observed monkeys, great rodents and some snakes along the way.There,
I found the Waterfall of the Caipora, that probably takes this name due to the
supposed appearances of the mythical being, the protector of the animals, who
has the peculiar physical characteristic of having its feet turned backwards,
just like its Northeast Argentine counterpart of similar legend.
The entrance to the underground world was discovered
by the Bandeirantes expedition in 1738; they had confused the brightness of the
stalagtites with veins of silver. Embedded in the wall, a few yards from the
entrance, there is an image of Our Lady of Lourdes. Until the 1950s, it was
there that a sacred walk which simulated the Calvary of Christ ended, tradition
that today has been lost. The cave is about 1,120
meters long and 70 deep, but even nowadays some tunnel ways exist that have not
been explored nor mapped.
In an article by Schwennhagen, published in
September of 1925, in the periodical called The Press of Sobral, in Ceará state,
the scholar placed objections to a natural origin of the grotto, attributing its
artificial nature to the old Tupi indians. In the article, he said that, in the high Mountain range of the Ibiapaba,
there was an ample cut in form of an amphitheater, with symmetrical hillsides
some 500 high. In one place, a kind of fissure opens up and runs along until,
further up, it finds the entrance of the great cave. “Later on,” he wrote,
the priests decided to cut out a cavern of bigger dimensions. Thus the great
project started, whose execution took two hundred or three hundred years.
The mountain range of Ubatuba, next to Ubajara, was
another place chosen by the Phoenicians to explore wealth mineral, according to
the theory of Ludwig Schwennhagen. “... there is also a mineral with the
brightness of the silver which is up there, that could be lead or tin. Some
distance from the town of Ubatuba there is the city of Viçosa (Viçosa of Ceará
state) which is 30 kilometers away; the
great copper deposits start at around halfway...
copper and tin were, for the Phoenicians, as important a wealth as gold”wrote
Schwennhagen in his book Ancient History of Brazil: 1.100 B.C. to 1,500 A.C.
(1928).
Even now, according to the author, from Viçosa on
South, there extends an ample mineral zone inside of the Mountain range of the
Ibiapaba, which has dozens of hills, tunnels and grottos. “... the most
interesting point of interest being the immense cavern system of Ubajara, with
twelve great halls and more than a thousand meters of underground corridors, and
beyond part which is so far unexplored. A huge controversy came up in relation
to this cavern system between the author of this paper and the adherents to the
erosion theory, who declare the cavern to be a work of nature. There is no doubt
that the grotto of Ubajara was a
salitre plant, whose mineral was extracted by means of an artificial filtering
still in use today in Syria and Asia Minor.
Schwennhagen remembered that there used to be a
legend according to which an underground river used to leave the grotto of
Ubajara in the direction of the state of Piauí, that, during droughts, would
form a passageway which the people could use for walking many leagues.
Nowadays, the artificial nature of the cave is
contested by geologists.
Still, though, the belief survives that a great underground river exists that connects the grotto with the formations of Seven Cities. It is through this underground passage that the treasure hunters and other curiosity seekers that had tried, without success, disappeared forever, failing to make passage of 140 kilometers in a straight line. Another mystery: Years ago, in the entire region, UFOs were observed, some of them being huge, almost always floating over the mountain ranges.
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