SEMPRE VIVAS
BRAZIL - 2024-2026
How the harvesting of sempre-vivas shaped a unique flower-picking culture and the challenges it now faces across Brazil’s only mountain range
High in the rocky fields of Brazil’s Cerrado, a delicate family of plants endures. The Eriocaulaceae, known as sempre-vivas (“forever alive” in Portuguese), thrive where almost nothing else does. These flowers form the foundation of a UNESCO-recognized traditional culture: the Apanhadores de Flores, the flower pickers.
For centuries, communities scattered across the Espinhaço have harvested sempre-vivas as their primary livelihood, drying the blossoms and selling them for bouquets. Families time their lives by the flowering season, migrating to natural grottos and high-altitude fields to gather the flowers. Towns like Diamantina built entire local economies around the trade.
But the world around the sempre-vivas has changed. Over the last two decades, native flower fields have shrunk dramatically as mining sites and monocultures pushed into the mountains. Many species are microendemic, growing only in tiny patches of rocky grassland. Habitat loss, combined with decades of intense harvesting, pushed several species toward threatened status.
In 2002, Sempre-Vivas National Park was created to protect the flowers and their fragile ecosystem. But its boundaries were drawn without fully considering the communities that had long depended on these lands. The measure helped parts of the ecosystem regenerate, bringing back animal species once rarely seen in the region. At the same time, however, it forced traditional flower pickers to walk far beyond the park boundaries to find the remaining wild flowers, extending their journeys and intensifying tensions between conservation policies and local livelihoods.
Last year, the park granted one community permission to collect flowers inside part of the protected area. But monitoring who enters a territory of more than 124,000 hectares remains difficult, especially with a limited number of park rangers. Outsiders with no connection to the region or to the flower-picking tradition also began entering the fields, often harvesting the flowers incorrectly and killing the plants in the process.
The pressure extends beyond the park boundaries. Preta, who lives on land inherited from her father along the edge of the national park, says part of the sempre-vivas she cultivates were recently stolen. Her father, Zé Basílio, was one of the first people in the region to successfully experiment with cultivating the flowers, knowledge that remains rare today.
Meanwhile, far from the national park, some communities found another way to keep their culture and income alive. Instead of relying solely on harvesting large quantities of sempre-vivas, they began producing artisanal crafts using dried flowers and other native species. The shift created more stable income, reduced pressure on threatened plants and rekindled interest among younger generations. By crafting instead of simply extracting, they found a way to keep both the flowers and the culture alive.
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