ISABEL VINCENT

TIME/CNN: WHEN THE ULTIMATE FIGHTER IS A WOMAN

TIME MAGAZINE BY ISABEL VINCENT photos by Zoran Milich.
Vanessa Porto made her name in one of the most watched videos on Brazilian sports websites. There, Porto, 23, took on an opponent named Cristiane Cyborg, a woman much bigger and heavier than her in Vale Tudo, the pastime North Americans call Ultimate Fighting. Porto did not win that fight but she stood her ground and ended the match on her feet, becoming a legend by aggressively going the distance. Now, Ultimate Fighting is Porto's career and she one of a handful of women who are rising stars in the controversial male-dominated sport.

Porto is still a little queasy about what she is able to do. She ended a match with a woman in her own weight class with a chokehold that left the opponent in convulsions. , "I was a little worried about what I had done," she confesses. But, "in Vale Tudo, it's everyone for themselves. If it hadn't been her, it would have been me on the floor."

But in Brazil, it was the Cyborg match in November 2005 that was the defining moment in Porto's career. "Nobody could understand how Vanessa, who is much lighter, just kept going for round after round, and not only resisting but fighting back with great aggression," said Mauricio Costa, a Vale Tudo promoter who runs the B-Tough Agency in Rio de Janeiro, a world center of the sport.

Trim and muscular, Porto became national champion in her weight class. And on July 14, she will make her international debut in Los Angeles at the Fatal Femmes Fighting championship, where she will square off against other women competitors from around the world. Nevertheless, she is growing tired of her female opponents. She has offered to take on the best male Vale Tudo fighter in the country. "The rules won't permit it, of course," said Costa, adding that women have been involved in Vale Tudo since about 2003. "But she's totally serious about taking on men."

Vale Tudo, which translates as "anything goes" in Portuguese, originated among jiu-jitsu masters in Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana neighborhood, which has the largest concentration of jiu-jitsu academies in the world. Often called "cage fighting" or Ultimate Fighting in North America, fighters use a mixture of several different kinds of martial arts styles to force their opponent to "tap out" or give up. In Rio de Janeiro, matches became so brutal that fighters were often rushed to the hospital after their matches. There is now a 30-page rule book ("no hair-pulling, no eye-gouging, no biting"), and participants must submit to medical reviews before they are allowed to fight. But matches have been banned by the city of Rio de Janeiro and Carioca aficionados of Vale Tudo have to go to neighboring municipalities to watch the bouts. Still it is precisely the brutality that draws thousands of people to Vale Tudo matches in Brazil, and now in North America where Vale Tudo has been popularized by the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a Las Vegas organization, and Spike TV.

Although it has long been the domain of male fighters, Vale Tudo is increasingly attracting young women with a background in martial arts from all over the world. "Brazilian women are the best in the world today," said Daniel Otero, who is 24 and one of the world's foremost Vale Tudo fighters. Otero and others involved with the sport here believe that both Brazilian men and women have an advantage because they are often experts in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which is the art of grappling on the ground developed by world-renowned fighter Helio Gracie, and popularized by his nine sons around the world. Gracie, who is 95 and still teaching in Brazil, worked with Muhammad Ali and some of the world's great fighters to help them develop their technique.

Porto has a brown belt in jiu-jitsu and every day trains in jiu-jitsu, wrestling and boxing with her coach Pedro Iglesias, a black belt jiu-jitsu master with a gothic tattoo on his forearm that reads "Jesus." "There are no other women to train with here, so I use men and it's pretty intense and rigorous," says Porto, who despite her fierce reputation in the ring is well-spoken and has a gentle manner, especially with her dog, an uncharacteristically calm pit bull named Hannah. Training takes place in the small community center in Jua, her gritty small hometown of 150,000 in the interior of Sao Paulo state. It is an all-day affair, with a few breaks for meals and rest.

Although Porto's family supports her fighting career, others in Jua, a conservative Catholic town some four hours from the city of Sao Paulo, don't quite understand why a young woman wants to get into a ring and fight so brutally. "People don't understand that I look at this as a job," she says. "I never think that I hate my opponent or that I want to kill them. I am just there to do my job, and to do it well."

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NEW YORK TIMES T Style Magazine

The Talk. Village Vanguard in Tiradentes, Brazil. By Isabel Vincent.

There was much excitement in the village of Tiradentes when Anna Maria Parsons, the proprietress of an elegant inn in the center of town, recently installed a deep, hand-crafted soapstone bath-tub in one of her premier guestrooms. The tub is an earthy shade of gray-green and weighs more than 900 kilograms. The installation required six burly men, using three car jacks to hoist it into place.

No one in Tiradentes, a baroque village of 9,000 people nestled in the hills of Minas Gerais in the Brazilian interior, had ever seen anything like it. In three hundred years, no one, it seems, had ever thought to use locally mined soapstone to fashion a tub.

“It was a very bold idea,” admits Parsons, a British-trained art history professor who runs Solar da Ponte, one of Brazil’s most beautiful boutique hotels, with her English husband, a former engineer. “In this part of the world, soapstone is used for cooking, and to keep food hot. So, I figured what better material to keep your bath-water hot?”

It’s this single-minded devotion to authenticity that first drew me to Tiradentes, a former gold-mining village of narrow stone streets and moody skies, some fifteen years ago. The dusty drive, past industrial towns and lush farmland, was over five hours from Rio de Janeiro, where I live.

Now, with the construction of a new airport in nearby Sao Joao del Rey, the locals will likely see more foreign tourists in the region, which is dotted with baroque hamlets that line the Royal Highway, an eighteenth century route that cuts through mountains and pristine forest set up by the Portuguese crown for the transportation of gold, silver and diamonds. There were so many mines in the region that when Portuguese explorers first arrived here in the eighteenth century, they simply called the area Minas Gerais or “general mines.”

But while many of the local merchants and hotelkeepers, many of them transplanted artists and professionals from other parts of Brazil and South America, told me they were pleased about the new airport, no one seemed overly enthusiastic. While they welcome tourism, no one here wants to see Tiradentes overrun, even though the village now hosts the best culinary festival in Brazil every August, an annual international film festival in January, and is one of the best places in the country for antiques and folk art.

Often overlooked by tourists to Brazil, who usually gravitate to the beaches in the northeast or to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Tiradentes and the nearby artists’ colony in Bichinho, which is seven kilometers away on a winding dirt track through hilly farm country, have been well known to baroque art aficionados for years.

The religious sculptures in the Matriz de Santo Antonio, a white-washed stone church that dates from 1752 and sits at the highest point in the village, were carved by the Brazilian baroque master Antonio Francisco Lisboa, better known as Aleijadinho or “little cripple.” Commissioned by the Portuguese crown, Aleijadinho, who had leprosy and who, legend has it, lost parts of his body to the disease while he was engaged in his final commissions, built his reputation in Ouro Preto, Brazil’s greatest baroque city and the former state capital of Minas Gerais.

Tiradentes was one of fourteen villages that the Portuguese established by royal decree in 1718 when it was known as Vila de Sao Jose do Rio das Mortes. It was renamed Tiradentes in the nineteenth century, in honor of Jose da Silva Xavier, the martyred leader of an important independence movement, who was also a local dentist, known locally as Tiradentes or “the toothpuller.”

In Tiradentes, there are monuments to the “toothpuller” everywhere. Restaurants and hotels are named for the man, whose execution on April 21, 1789 is commemorated every year as a national holiday. For years, history buffs and busloads of schoolchildren descended on the village to tour the historic sites. Few of them stayed for very long, until some local residents decided to open small pousadas and inns to accommodate the visitors.

Remarkably in the fifteen years since I was here, little seems to have changed in Tiradentes. There are more restaurants and antique shops, which have opened in recent years, but they are discreetly housed in the terra-cotta roofed cottages which have been given a fresh coat of white-wash and colorful trim. The village still remains one of the most unspoiled historic towns in South America.

Indeed, this is a place where local residents pack village council meetings to convince politicians not to pave certain roads or throw open the region to mass tourism. These days, the biggest issue before the village council is a bill that seeks to keep traffic to a minimum, chiefly by banning vehicles from the winding, narrow, cobble-stoned streets. In Tiradentes, where residents still hang tin buckets on their gates for the milkman, visitors are encouraged to walk or hire horse-drawn buggies from one of the small stone bridges at the entrance.

“In a globalized world, Tiradentes marks an important identity,” says Parsons, who has lived in the village for more than thirty years and pioneered an informal local movement that seeks to preserve everything from the old carving techniques that produced some of the world’s finest baroque art to the way flour is milled, and now, the way bath-water is heated. She is also working with a local orchestra to revive eighteenth century music. At Solar da Ponte, her hotel, there is a ban on synthetic fabrics, and modern conveniences such as television sets and space heaters are discreetly hidden from view. The flour used in the home-made cookies and crusty bread that are served at breakfast and afternoon tea, is stone-milled using local spring water. The butter and fresh cheeses are all provided by local farmers, and every piece of furniture was created by local master carpenters, who also helped the Parsons’ restore the original eighteenth century structure that houses the inn.

“There is a strong tradition here of the decorative arts,” says Bernard Rohrmann, a puppet master who runs the village’s only puppet theater at his hotel the Tres Portas in the historic center. “It’s always been a center of woodworking, local crafts and regional cuisine.”

Indeed, since anyone can remember, this once impoverished village tucked into the Serra de Sao Jose mountain range, has attracted earnest architects and interior designers from Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro who would congregate on weekends, scouring local barns and a handful of tiny antique shops for an eighteenth century door handle or baroque ceramic tiles. Then they would sample some of the local cachacas (among the best sugar-cane alcohol in Brazil), and dine on specialties, such as slow-roasted pork, chicken stewed with okra and manioc, or shredded strips of dried beef cooked with mashed pumpkin.

These days, thanks to the nine-year-old culinary festival that has drawn such internationally recognized chefs such as Christian Le Squer from Ledoyen in Paris, Tiradentes features small food boutiques. The shelves are crammed with bottles of small red chillies and homemade preserves from such exotic fruits as jabuticaba. There is also an impressive selection of locally produced cheeses, including an earthy, smoked buffalo milk mozarrella that is in itself worth the trip to Tiradentes. Cellophane-wrapped sweets made from doce de leite, shredded coconut, chocolate and peanuts are also local specialties, and are sold the old-fashioned way -- by weight on nineteenth century scales, in many of the sweets shops.

Looking for the best cachaca in the region? Local shop owners now stock the award-winning cachacas from the culinary festival. Last year’s choice was Barrosinha, and the bottles, which retail for less than $10 each, line the shelves of every specialty food shop in the village.

I couldn’t figure out if it was the influence of the culinary festival or whether they were just extending typical small town hospitality, but on my most recent visit a few months ago, the local chefs would happily forsake their kitchen duties, plunk themselves down at my table and speak at length about their ingredients.

At Trattoria Via Destra, the best Italian restaurant, in the village, the chef likes to greet his diners with a minute description of all the ingredients that go into his Bolognese sauce, a recipe passed on to him by his Italian great-grandmother. At Villa Paolucci, a rambling 18th century plantation converted into an upscale inn eight years ago, the owners will prepare roast pork to order every weekend. Luiz Ney Assis Fonseca, one of the owners who doubles as the weekend chef, uses a family recipe passed on from his grandmother. He marinates a whole pig in wine and provencal spices for six days before baking it in an 800 degree clay oven. The meal is served outdoors at a grand table, set with Baccarat, heavy silver and vases of wild flowers, with Chet Baker or Ella Fitzgerald crooning in the background.

“When you roast the pig at such hot temperatures, the skin pops to a wonderful crispiness,” says Raquel Paolucci, Fonseca’s blonde, sun-bronzed wife who regularly walks through the Villa that is her family property in riding pants and boots. “The taste is very special.”

So special that Paolucci told me that the patriarch of Brazil’s biggest media empire recently hired a small fleet of helicopters to fly his family down from Rio de Janeiro for a recent weekend feast. Villa Paolucci has a grassy landing strip on the premises, just behind the clay tennis court. Ok, so it’s not very authentic or in keeping with the historical preservation movement, admits Paolucci. But, she shrugs, “sometimes, you just have to give in to progress.”

ISABEL VINCENT © THE NEW YORK TIMES. Photos Zoran Milich ©