On November 14, 2018, at 6:42 AM, Rafael Teixeira Brandão sent a WhatsApp audio message to his older brother. It lasted 11 seconds. He said he was already on the road, that the day had dawned clear, and that he was going to take advantage of it to descend to the bottom of the canyon before noon. His brother listened to the audio at 7:15 AM, replied with, “Take care down there,” and went to work.
Rafael was 26 years old. He lived in Ponta Grossa, worked as a refrigeration technician, and knew the Guartelá canyon like the back of his hand. He had been there dozens of times since he was 17. He knew where the ground gave way, where the rock became slippery after the rain, where the cell phone signal completely disappeared. He wasn’t a weekend tourist.
This was a young man from Campos Gerais who grew up listening to the sound of the river below and who treated that sandstone cliff as his backyard. Rafael never returned. His car, a silver 2011 Gol, with a trail sticker on the rear window, was found two days later in the dirt parking lot near the entrance to Guartelá State Park, in Tibagi.
The backpack was in the back seat. Inside it were two bottles of water, one full and one half-empty, a packet of peanut brittle, sunscreen, a headlamp, and the cell phone charger. The apartment keys were in the center console. The cell phone was not found in the car. The last recorded connection was at 9:21 AM at a tower near the park entrance. After that, silence.
And this is the story of a young man who disappeared on a Wednesday in November in one of the largest canyons in Brazil and who was found 5 years later, upside down, trapped in a narrow crevice between sandstone rocks, 140 m deep, in a section that search teams said they had inspected more than once.
The Guartelá Canyon is located in the municipality of Tibagi, in the Campos Gerais region of Paraná. It is over 30 km long and has walls that reach 180 m in height. It is considered one of the largest sandstone canyons in the world. From above, the landscape is open, with clean fields and sparse cerrado vegetation. But down below, where the river flows between dark stones, the terrain changes, the fissures multiply, the walls narrow, the vegetation closes in, and the sound of the water drowns out any shout.
And it’s a place that swallows those who don’t know it, and, as this story shows, also swallows those who do. Rafael went out alone that day. It wasn’t his usual thing, but it wasn’t the first time either. His brother only started to find it strange when, on Thursday night, he called twice and both calls went straight to voicemail. On Friday morning, he called his mother.
The mother called the girlfriend. The girlfriend called the best friend. No one had any news. At 11:00 AM on Friday, November 16, 2018, the family filed a police report at the Ponta Grossa police station. The officer asked if Rafael had a history of disappearing, if he had debts, if he had problems with anyone.
The mother replied no, that her son was a hard worker, that he had gone hiking and that he was not one to go without giving news. And the officer calmly noted everything down and explained that the standard procedure was to wait. Mrs. Marilene Teixeira understood, in that plastic chair at the police station, that the urgency she felt didn’t fit into the form the man was filling out.
From here, the story unfolds slowly, and everything that happened needs to be told without haste. How long can a mother endure repeating the same story at different police stations before realizing that no one is really looking? What happens to a search when the terrain is too vast, too deep, and too dangerous for anyone to descend where they need to? And what does it mean to find someone 5 years later in a place they’ve already looked, trapped in a position that no forensic report has been able to fully explain?
We are in the Guartelá canyon in November 2018. The heat of the Campos Gerais region is punishing from early morning. The cerrado is dry. Sandstone rocks exposed to the sun crack into thin layers that crumble under the weight of a boot. Down below, the river flows indifferently, and a 26-year-old man who knew every inch of that place is about to disappear into it.
Rafael Teixeira Brandão was born in Ponta Grossa in 1992, the son of Marilene Teixeira, a kitchen assistant at a buffet restaurant in the city center, and Osvaldo Brandão, a truck driver who traveled the Ponta Grossa-Paranaguá route and spent more time on the road than at home. He grew up in a rented two-story house in the Uvaranas neighborhood, sharing a room with his older brother, Leandro, and learned early on that free time was spent outside, because inside the house there wasn’t even enough space to breathe properly.
The two-story house was on a cobblestone street with a broken curb, where the puppies slept in the middle of the sidewalk and the children played ball until dark. Mom would leave early and come back smelling of oil and fried onions. Dad would show up every three or four days, leave money in the dresser drawer, take a hot shower, and leave again before sunrise. Leandro, four years older, looked after Rafael when his mother was at work. He heated up lunch, checked his homework, and put him to bed. The two had this dynamic. Leandro was the one who held on, Rafael was the one who escaped.
At age 12, Rafael was already cycling to Vila Velha State Park with his school friends. It was a 10 to 12 km ride, depending on which route they took. They would return covered in red dirt, with scraped knees and the thirst of someone who had spent the whole day running among sandstone formations without drinking enough water. His mother complained, but without being firm. She knew it was better than leaving the boy locked in a small apartment, watching television all day.
At 15, Rafael visited Guartelá on a school trip. The bus left at dawn, packed with teenagers who were more interested in headphones and snacks than geology. Not Rafael. Rafael leaned against the railing of the viewpoint, looked down, and stood still. The geography teacher had to call him back to the group twice.
That night at home, Rafael told his brother he wanted to go back there. Leander asked why. Rafael couldn’t explain and only said that down there was a river that made a sound unlike anything he had ever heard. From the age of 17, Rafael started going to Guartelá on his own, first with friends, then alone. He met older hikers in the region, people from Castro, Tibagi, and Telêmaco Borba, who climbed up and down those walls with the ease of someone climbing stairs. He learned to use ropes, to read the weather by the wind, to identify the points where the sandstone was firm and where it crumbled like stale biscuits.
He never took a formal climbing course, but he had the kind of knowledge you gain through your body, making mistakes, falling, and getting back up. By 20, he was already the guy his friends called when they wanted to go down to the river. By 23, I had a mental map of the canyon that few locals would have. I knew where the wide cracks that served as passageways were, where the cerrado vegetation gave way to gallery forest, where the ground became slippery after three days of rain.
He knew Guartelá like the back of his hand, and perhaps that’s why he never imagined that place could close in on him. At 24, Rafael finished his technical course in refrigeration at SENAI in Ponta Grossa and started working for an air conditioning maintenance company that served businesses and offices in the central region. The salary wasn’t high, but it was enough to share an apartment with his girlfriend Jéssica Almeida, whom he met at a barbecue with mutual friends in the Oficinas neighborhood.
Jessica was a nursing technician, working at the university hospital and doing rotating shifts that didn’t always coincide with Rafael’s. The two made do as best they could, leaving notes on the refrigerator, sending audio messages early in the morning, having dinner together when they could. It wasn’t a life from a soap opera, it was the life of people who work, pay the bills, and try to fit the rest into the time they have left. And for Rafael, the rest was always the canyon.
On the morning of November 14, 2018, Rafael woke up before 6 a.m. The apartment in Jardim Carvalho was small. Living room, bedroom, open-plan kitchen, and a bathroom with a plastic shower stall that was constantly jamming. Jéssica had arrived from her night shift around 3 a.m. and was fast asleep.
Rafael drank coffee with milk and ate bread with butter, standing leaning against the kitchen counter, looking out the window at the empty parking lot of the building across the street. He washed his mug, dried it with a dish towel, and left a note on the counter, poorly written in pen on a scrap of notebook paper: “I went to Guartelá, I’ll be back tonight. Is there any rice in the fridge?”
He didn’t sign; he didn’t need to. Jessica knew the handwriting and the habit. Rafael would leave like that, quietly, whenever he had a day off in the middle of the week and the weather was nice. He’d grab his backpack, fill his water bottles, throw everything in the back seat of his Gol (car model), and leave before the traffic started. The backpack was always the same, an old navy blue one, with the straps patched with black tape. Inside, the kit he always carried: two 1-liter water bottles, one full and one half-empty, a packet of peanut candy, SPF 50 sunscreen, a headlamp with new batteries, and his cell phone charger.
He hadn’t brought a tent or sleeping bag. The plan was to descend to the bottom of the canyon in the morning, have lunch in Tibagi, and return to Ponta Grossa before dark. A one-day trip he’d done dozens of times. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to worry about.
The PR-340, which connects Ponta Grossa to Tibagi, is a single-lane road that cuts through the Campos Gerais region, passing through soybean farms, pastures surrounded by barbed wire, and stretches of sparse cerrado vegetation, where the wind blows dry and constantly. In November, the heat is already intense from early morning. The asphalt trembles on the horizon, and the trucks raise a cloud of red dust that clings to the windshield. Rafael knew every curve of that road. He knew where the asphalt was bad, where the potholes appeared after the rain, where the timber trucks got stuck on the uphill climbs, forcing the line to move at 40 kilometers per hour.
That day, the road was empty. The silver Gol covered the 90 km in just over an hour. At around 8:15, Rafael must have parked on the dirt lot near the entrance to Guartelá State Park. The cell tower record shows that the device last connected at 9:21 in the morning to an antenna located less than 2 km from the park entrance.
After that, the phone disappeared from the network. It may have run out of battery, it may have lost signal on the way down, it may have fallen, nobody knows. The cell phone was never found. What is known is that Rafael entered the park that morning and didn’t come out. Nobody saw him on the main trail. No park employee remembered his face. No other visitor reported crossing paths with a young man with a blue backpack going down towards the river.
It’s possible he used an alternative route off the official trail, something he did frequently. According to his brother, it’s possible he descended via one of the points known only to him and a handful of local hikers. It’s possible that on that day I chose a path I had never tried before. The canyon offers that temptation. Each descent reveals a new crevice, a stone corridor not visible from above, a passage that seems to lead somewhere and sometimes does, and sometimes doesn’t.
On Thursday night, Leandro Brandão called his brother for the first time. The call went straight to voicemail. The operator’s recorded voice repeated the phrase every Brazilian has heard: “The number you have dialed cannot be completed at this time.”
And Leandro hung up without thinking much. Rafael sometimes lost signal when he went down to the bottom of the canyon. Sometimes he slept in Tibagi at an acquaintance’s house and only returned the next day. It wasn’t a cause for alarm, it was just his brother’s way. But when he called again on Friday morning, before leaving for the workshop, and the result was the same, something changed. It wasn’t fear yet. It was that feeling that any Brazilian knows when you call someone who always answers and suddenly the phone just rings in the void. Something smaller than panic, but bigger than worry. Something that has no name, but that makes a person drop what they’re doing and call their mother.
Leandro called Dona Marilene at 7:40 in the morning. His mother answered on the second ring, her voice sounding like she’d been up for a while, probably tidying up the kitchen before leaving for the restaurant. Leandro asked if she’d spoken to Rafael. Marilene said no, that she hadn’t spoken to him since Tuesday. Leandro said he’d called twice and that her cell phone was off. There was a short silence on the line, the kind that lasts two or three seconds but feels like a minute. Marilene said she was going to call Jéssica.
Jessica, who had just arrived from the night shift and was sleeping, woke up to the phone ringing and answered with a groggy voice. She said that Rafael had left on Wednesday morning for Guartelá and hadn’t returned. She said she thought it was strange, but that he had done this before, sleeping in Tibagi and returning the next day. But now it was Friday, two days without news. The chain of calls continued. Jessica called Davi, Rafael’s best friend, who lived in Oficinas and worked at a beverage distributor. Davi knew nothing, he hadn’t spoken to Rafael since the previous Sunday. Leandro called two of his brother’s hiking buddies. Neither of them was with him. Neither of them knew he had gone to Guartelá that week.
At 10 a.m., Leandro got in his car and went to Rafael’s apartment in Jardim Carvalho. The note was still on the counter: “I went to Guartelá, I’ll be back tonight. There’s rice in the fridge.”
The handwriting was firm, unhurried. The rice was still in the refrigerator, and Rafael was nowhere to be found. The police report was filed on the morning of Friday, November 16th. At the 13th Police Subdivision of Ponta Grossa, the police station building was located on a busy downtown street, with a peeling paint facade and a small parking lot where police cars squeezed between motorcycles and bicycles.
Dona Marilene was accompanied by Leandro and Jéssica. The three sat in white plastic chairs in a narrow hallway that smelled of reheated coffee and cleaning products. The ceramic floor was stained. The ceiling fan rotated slowly, making a tired gear noise. On the wall, a yellowed poster informed citizens of their rights in case of being caught in the act.
On the other side of the counter, a middle-aged clerk, wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt and with a blue Bic pen tucked into his pocket, picked up a form and began asking the usual questions. Full name of the missing person. Date of birth. Height. Weight. Eye color. Hair color. Distinguishing marks. Marilene answered everything precisely. She said her son was 1.78 m tall and weighed 72 kg. He had short, dark brown hair, brown eyes, a thin scar on his left chin from when he fell off his bicycle at age 9, and a small tattoo on his left forearm, a compass, done at age 21 in a studio in downtown Ponta Grossa.
The clerk took notes and asked what clothes Rafael was wearing when he left home. Marilene looked at Jessica. Jessica said she wasn’t sure because she was sleeping, but it was probably the khaki shorts and gray t-shirt he always wore for hiking with a pair of mid-calf brown boots. The clerk asked if Rafael had a history of psychiatric disorder. Marilene said no. He asked if he used drugs. Marilene said no. He asked if he had debts, if he was involved in any risky situations, if he had conflicts with anyone. Marilene answered everything with no, her voice firm and her eyes dry.
When asked what would happen next, the clerk explained that the case would be registered as a disappearance, that it would be forwarded to the Civil Police, and that, depending on the likely location of the missing person, the Fire Department might be called. He also explained that it was advisable for the family to contact the police station in Tibagi, since the disappearance had occurred in that municipality. Marilene listened to everything in silence. Leandro asked how long it would take. The clerk said it depended. He said that each case was different. He said that the family should stay in contact and await further instructions.
Dona Marilene left the police station with the folded copy of the police report in her purse. On the way to the car, she didn’t say anything. Jéssica was crying softly with her hand over her mouth. Leandro walked two steps ahead with his keys in his hand and his jaw clenched. None of the three said what they were all thinking: that this form was the beginning of something no one wanted to start, that from that moment on, Rafael’s name existed in a system, not as a son, brother, or boyfriend, but as an incident, a number, a case among hundreds of other cases of people who disappeared and whom someone, somewhere, was trying to find or not.
On Monday, November 19th, five days after the disappearance, a team from the Tibagi Fire Department’s first sub-group began searching the Guartelá State Park area. The team consisted of six men, two Belgian Shepherd sniffer dogs, and a drone with a 20-minute flight range. The operation was commanded by a lieutenant in his early thirties who knew the park well and understood the magnitude of the problem even before the search began.
The Guartelá canyon is over 30 km long. In some sections, the sandstone walls are vertical and exceed 150 m in height. Access to the bottom, where the river runs between blocks of stone and dense vegetation, requires rappelling at specific points, hours of hiking through dense forest, and equipment that most fire departments in the interior of Paraná simply do not possess.
The team did what they could with what they had. For the first three days, they searched the park’s main trail, the viewpoint, known access points to the river, and two alternative descent points that the family indicated as places frequented by Rafael. The sniffer dogs worked with a used t-shirt of Rafael’s that Jéssica brought from the apartment. The drone flew over the upper sections of the canyon, capturing aerial images of the edges and rock platforms visible from above. The firefighters rappelled down at two points to a depth of 40 to 60 meters and searched the riverbank for approximately 4 km.
They found nothing, no trace, no piece of clothing, no sign of recent passage, no personal belongings. The dogs didn’t pick up anything consistent. They sniffed in several directions, but without the persistence that indicates a firm lead. The problem, as the lieutenant later explained to the family, was one of scale. The canyon is too large. There are many crevices. Some are less than half a meter wide and plunge vertically for tens of meters, impossible to access without specialized speleological equipment, and others are hidden behind blocks of crumbling rock, covered by vegetation that grows rapidly in the humid heat of the valley floor.
Searching every crack, every crevice, every square meter of that terrain would require weeks of work with dozens of men and equipment that wasn’t readily available. The firefighters did their best. They returned three times the following week. By the third time, the dogs were no longer reacting. The drone had already covered all accessible angles. The report began to take shape.
Leandro watched the search for two days from a distance, from the dirt parking lot where his brother’s silver Gol had been found. He stood there, arms crossed, watching the firefighters enter the woods and return hours later empty-handed. He didn’t ask many questions, he didn’t get in the way. Anyone who looked at him saw a man who was slowly and silently understanding that the place where his brother had disappeared wasn’t going to give anything back easily, that that canyon had a bottom that no one could reach, and that each day that passed without finding Rafael was a day the canyon won.
Thirty days after the disappearance, the official search was called off. The Fire Department’s report, dated December 19, 2018, recorded that the area had been searched within the available operational capabilities and that no trace of the missing person had been found. The document was three and a half pages long, written in technical language, with geographic coordinates, descriptions of the areas searched, and a list of equipment used.
On the last page, a line read: “It is recommended that the case be referred to the Civil Police for further investigative proceedings.”
For the person who wrote it, it was standard procedure. For the Brandão family, that sentence was like a door closing. Mrs. Marilene received the news by phone. She didn’t cry right away. She asked if that meant they had given up. The firefighter on the other end of the line explained that it wasn’t giving up, that it was the end of the active search phase due to a lack of new leads and that the case remained open with the Civil Police. Marilene thanked him, hung up, sat in the kitchen chair and stared at the phone as if expecting it to ring again with different news. The phone didn’t ring.
From that moment on, the family took over what the State had failed to continue. Dona Marilene, who until then had gone to Tibagi three times a week, hitching rides with Leandro, neighbors, or anyone she could because she didn’t drive, decided she wasn’t going to stop. She started going on weekends, carrying food in a plastic container and spending the whole day on the edge of the canyon, asking hikers, park employees, and rural residents if anyone had seen anything, heard anything, or knew of any place where a boy might have fallen and not been found.
Most people listened respectfully. Some looked away. No one had an answer. Leandro took time off from his job at Neves’s mechanic shop, where he had been employed for 6 years, and began organizing volunteer searches. He created a WhatsApp group with Rafael’s off-road friends, work colleagues, and people who volunteered after the story appeared in a local newspaper in Ponta Grossa.
For the first three weekends, there were between 10 and 12 people. They went down as far as they could, shouted Rafael’s name, searched accessible crevices, and took photos of sections that looked suspicious. On the fourth weekend there were five, on the fifth three. People’s lives take their toll, obligations return. Solidarity has a time limit that isn’t always long enough.
Jessica created a Facebook page called “Find Rafael Brandão.” She posted photos of him in the canyon, at a barbecue, at his Senai graduation, with his blue backpack and that knowing smile he always had. She included a physical description, the police report number, and the contact information for the Tibagi police station. The page got 300 likes in the first week, and then traffic dwindled. The posts continued, but the comments became scarce. Every now and then someone would say they were going to pray, someone would suggest a psychic, someone would ask if they had already searched the river. Jessica responded to everything politely and with a patience that came from a place she herself couldn’t explain.
The Brandão family did what thousands of Brazilian families do every year when the State says it did everything possible: they undertook the impossible on their own, without training, without equipment, without funding, using their own gasoline, food from home, and a stubbornness that isn’t courage. It’s the inability to stop when it comes to someone who went out to hike and simply didn’t come back.
The first Christmas without Rafael was in 2018, a little over 40 days after his disappearance. Dona Marilene set the table, as always, a white tablecloth over a plastic one, porcelain plates that only came out of the cupboard in December, the rice with raisins that Rafael hated, but ate so as not to displease his mother. Leandro went with his wife. Jéssica appeared later with a platter of farofa and swollen eyes. No one put the plate in Rafael’s place. No one mentioned it. But everyone looked at the empty chair at least once during the night. At 11:30, Dona Marilene excused herself, went to the bathroom and stayed there for 10 minutes. When she returned, her face was washed and her eyes were dry. She sat down, served the turkey and said it was good, that he could eat.
The second Christmas was similar, but with fewer people. The third, Marilene only had a simple lunch with Leandro. The fourth was hardly celebrated. And the date lost its meaning, not because the family had given up on Rafael, but because his absence was too great to fit into a celebration. It was like trying to celebrate inside a room where a wall was missing.
Over time, the pain didn’t lessen, it just changed form. In the first few months it was sharp. It would cut through her chest in the middle of the night. It would wake Dona Marilene at 4 in the morning, certain that she had heard the door opening. Then it became something heavier and slower, a tiredness that wouldn’t go away with sleep, a distraction that would take over in the middle of a conversation, a way of looking into the void that others noticed but didn’t comment on.
Dona Marilene stopped going to Tibagi every week. He started going once a month, then every two months. Not because he had given up, but because his body was demanding what his mind refused to accept. Hitchhiking became more difficult, the road longer, the canyon remained the same, enormous, silent, indifferent. Each trip was a repetition of the same ritual: arriving, looking down, asking the same questions to the same people, and returning home without answers. At some point, the repetition ceased to be a quest and became penance.
Rafael’s room in the two-story house in Uvaranas, where he no longer lived but where he still kept boxes containing things from his adolescence, remained closed. No one opened the door after December 2018. The boxes remained where they were: trophies from his school futsal championship, old magazines, a collection of stones he had gathered between the ages of 13 and 16. Dona Marilene passed by the door every day, on her way to the bathroom, and every day she did the same thing: she looked at the doorknob and kept walking.
Jessica stayed another year living in the Jardim Carvalho apartment before deciding she couldn’t take it anymore. It wasn’t a dramatic decision. It was the kind of decision a person makes when they realize they’ve been sleeping all night, staring at the door waiting for someone who won’t come in. She packed Rafael’s things into a box, gave them to Leandro, and moved to a smaller apartment in Nova Rússia. She continued maintaining the Facebook page for another year, but the posts became less frequent. In 2021, she stopped posting. The page remained inactive with the last post saying, “Three years without a response, three years of longing.”
Leandro returned to work at the workshop, but his colleagues noticed he had changed. He was quieter, his gestures were more reserved, he laughed less, spoke less. He did the job with the same competence as always, but without that lightness he had before. That thing of whistling while changing a belt, of telling jokes at lunchtime, of asking about the game. His friends at the workshop said among themselves that Leandro seemed to be carrying an excessively heavy load in his pocket all day. No one commented on it to him. Among workshop workers, this kind of pain is respected in silence.
The city of Ponta Grossa continued functioning. Buses passed in front of the Uvaranas townhouse at the same time. The buffet restaurant where Dona Marilene worked continued serving the same set meal as always: rice, beans, steak with onions, salad, and farofa. The bus terminal had the same noise, the same smell of diesel, and the same movement of people coming and going. The world didn’t stop because Rafael Teixeira Brandão disappeared. The world never stops. It’s the family that stops. And the Brandão family stopped on that November 14, 2018, and never managed to move forward at the same pace again.
In October 2023, almost 5 years after Rafael’s disappearance, a technical climbing group from Curitiba contacted the IAT, the Paraná Water and Land Institute, to request permission to access a little-explored section of the south wall of the Guartelá canyon, about 7 km from the park’s main trail. The group was called Vertigo Escalada. It consisted of four permanent members and had been active for over 10 years on rock walls in Paraná, Santa Catarina, and São Paulo.
They weren’t there because of Rafael. They didn’t know his story and were there because that specific section of the south wall had never been mapped from a technical point of view. And the group wanted to document the possible climbing routes for a digital guide project they had been putting together for 2 years.
The four climbers, Bruno Tanaca, 32, a civil engineer; Cláudia Rúbia Martins, 29, a climbing instructor; Felipe Augusto Werner, 35, a photographer and mountaineer; and Diego Lopes Santana, 31, a civilian firefighter, arrived at the park on a Friday morning with complete equipment: 60-meter ropes, carabiners, belay devices, helmets with LED lights, a portable radio, dry bags, and two days’ worth of supplies. Authorization from the IAT (Instituto Ambiental do Paraná) permitted access to the southern section between Friday and Sunday, mapping all the anchor points used via GPS.
On Friday they surveyed the ridge and set up the first descent route. On Saturday, they began descending the south face, on a steep rock section, with an incline of almost 90º in some places. The sandstone there was different from what was seen on the main trail, more friable, with layers that came off in thin slabs, requiring extra attention with each hold.
The descent was slow. Every 20 meters they stopped to assess the rock, adjust the anchor points, and photograph the wall. It was on the second day of the descent, around 2 pm, that Bruno Tanaca noticed something in a narrow vertical crevice, approximately 140 meters deep from the upper edge of the canyon. Bruno was anchored to a rock ledge, adjusting his carabiner, when he turned his headlamp to the left and illuminated an opening in the wall that narrowed downwards, like an inverted funnel. At first, it looked like a dry branch, entangled between the sandstone walls, a piece of wood stuck in a crack, a common occurrence in that type of formation.
But when he adjusted the focus of the flashlight and looked more closely, he realized that the texture wasn’t wood, it was fabric. And underneath the fabric, something that shouldn’t be there. Bruno didn’t touch anything, he called Cláudia on the radio. Cláudia came down to the same level, looked, and said in a low voice that it looked like a body.
The two stood there for almost a minute, anchored to the rock, staring at the crevice without saying anything. Felipe, who was 10 meters above, asked over the radio what was happening. Bruno replied with four words: “I think we found someone.”
The group interrupted their descent, marked the GPS coordinates of the exact point, and climbed back to the edge. In the park’s parking lot, Bruno called 193 (the Brazilian emergency number) and reported what they had found. The call lasted 7 minutes. On the other end of the line, the fire department operator asked for a detailed description of the location, approximate depth, and apparent condition of what they had seen. Bruno spoke with the controlled voice of someone accustomed to high-altitude situations, but who had never found a body trapped in a sandstone crevice 140 meters from the ground.
The Fire Department team from the first sub-group of Tibagi arrived at the park on the morning of Monday, October 16, 2023, accompanied by experts from the IML (Institute of Legal Medicine) of Ponta Grossa and an officer from the BPMOA (Military Police Air Operations Battalion), who coordinated the support of a helicopter for transporting heavy equipment to the edge of the canyon.
The rescue operation, or more precisely the removal, took three days. The body was upside down, with the torso wedged between two sandstone walls that progressively narrowed to less than 40 cm at the tightest point. The legs were above, partially bent, held in place by friction against the rock. The arms were compressed above or below the head, depending on the perspective, squeezed against the uneven surface of the sandstone. The position was inverted. The face pointed towards the bottom of the crevice, the feet pointed towards the sky.
Firefighters were unable to access the body from above. The crack was too narrow at the top opening for a man with protective gear to pass through. They had to create a side access route, partially cutting the edge of an adjacent sandstone slab with precision tools, creating an opening just wide enough for a lean rescuer, equipped with harness and rope, to descend sideways to the point where the body lay. The rescuer who descended, a 27-year-old Fire Department corporal, later reported that the crevice smelled of damp earth and ancient decay, and that the body was so embedded in the rock that it seemed to have been molded by it.
The removal was carried out using flexible stretchers and pulley systems. It took almost six hours just to detach the body from the crevice without damaging the remains. The BPMOA helicopter transported the stretcher to an improvised landing area in the park’s parking lot, from where the body was taken to the IML (Forensic Medical Institute) of Ponta Grossa in a Civil Police vehicle.
Forensic experts noted that the state of decomposition was advanced, consistent with several years of exposure to the environment. The clothing, in fragments of synthetic fabric corresponding to a t-shirt and shorts, was degraded but partially preserved by confinement in the crevice. No shoes, cell phone, backpack, or any other personal belongings were found besides the remains of the clothing.
Experts observed that the body’s position, upside down, progressively fitting into a narrowing crevice, was consistent with a vertical fall followed by sliding due to gravity. The body’s weight would have pushed the torso downwards as the crevice narrowed, until friction between the rock and the body prevented any movement. It was a geological trap, the kind of thing you can’t see from above and can’t escape from below.
Experts also noted that, given the inverted position and the degree of entrapment, it was likely that the person had remained trapped alive for an indeterminate period before dying. The cause of death could not be precisely established. Decomposition and the effects of time on the tissues made any definitive conclusion impossible. But the most likely hypothesis, according to the report, was a combination of trauma from a fall, thoracic compression from the inverted position, and dehydration. In other words, Rafael, if that was Rafael, may have been trapped in that crevice upside down, conscious, for hours, perhaps days, unable to move, unable to shout loudly enough for anyone to hear, with the sound of the river drowning out any voice that rose from the rocks.
The identification process took 11 days. The state of decomposition prevented visual recognition. There were no viable fingerprints. A DNA test was requested, but the comparison depended on reference material from the family. And this process in Paraná, as in almost all of Brazil, takes weeks, if not months. What accelerated the identification was the dental examination. The family provided the name of the dentist Rafael frequented in Ponta Grossa, a clinic in the city center, near the cathedral, and the dental records were compared with the dental arch of the remains found. The match was positive.
Furthermore, on her left forearm, in an area where the skin was partially preserved by contact with the rock, experts identified fragments of subcutaneous pigment consistent with a tattoo. The design was no longer fully legible, but the shape and location matched the compass that Mrs. Marilene had described 5 years earlier, while sitting in a plastic chair at the 13th Police Subdivision of Ponta Grossa.
When the detective in charge of the case called the family on October 27, 2023, Leandro answered. He was in the workshop under a car, his hands covered in grease. He wiped his hands on a cloth, picked up his cell phone, and heard the detective say that human remains had been found in the Guartelá canyon and that the identification matched Rafael Teixeira Brandão. Leandro didn’t respond immediately. He remained silent for almost a minute, long enough for the detective to ask if he was still on the line.
Leandro said yes. He said he would tell his mother. He hung up, sat on the workshop floor, rested his head on the car wheel, and stayed there for a time he couldn’t even calculate. Dona Marilene received the news in the kitchen of the two-story house in Uvaranas. She was standing, leaning against the counter, chopping onions for lunch. Leandro entered through the back door with his face washed. He had washed his face before entering so as not to arrive looking like he was about to deliver the worst news of someone’s life. But Marilene saw. Mothers see. Before Leandro opened his mouth, she had already stopped chopping. She held the knife in her right hand, blade pointing downwards, and looked at her eldest son, as if expecting him to say something else. Anything at all.
Leandro said they had found Rafael. He said where. He said how. He didn’t say everything. He didn’t say the position of the body, he didn’t say how long he might have been trapped alive, because there are things a son isn’t obligated to tell his mother. Dona Marilene listened, didn’t scream, didn’t fall, dropped the knife in the sink, leaned on the counter with both hands and stared out the kitchen window, as if she were seeing something outside that no one else could see. She stayed like that for a while.
Then he said in a low voice, “At least now I know where he is.”
The question that remains unanswered to this day is how Rafael reached that crevice. The point where the body was found was 7 km from the park’s main trail, on a section of the south wall that is not part of any known, official, or alternative route. There is no trail leading there. There is no marked path. Access from above would require hours of hiking through open fields and dense scrubland, followed by approaching the edge of the canyon at a point without any visible landmarks. Access from below, via the river, would require climbing the rock face from the outside, something that even experienced climbers wouldn’t do without full equipment.
Rafael didn’t take his climbing equipment that day. His backpack was in the car. Inside were his water bottles, peanut brittle, and flashlight. Nothing suggested he planned to descend the wall via a technical route. He went on foot, with only the clothes on his back and his hiking boots. The most likely hypothesis, the one the Tibagi Civil Police investigation ultimately adopted, is that Rafael walked to the edge of the canyon at a point off the trail, perhaps exploring an access he had never attempted before, and that he slipped or stepped on a sandstone slab that gave way under his weight. The fall would have been vertical, straight into the crevice, which is almost invisible from above. An opening less than 1 meter wide, partially covered by sparse vegetation and loose rock blocks.
But this hypothesis doesn’t explain everything. It doesn’t explain why Rafael went to that point so far from the trail he knew. It doesn’t explain why he didn’t tell anyone he was going to explore a new area. It doesn’t explain why his backpack was left in the car. If he intended to spend the day in the canyon, why didn’t he take water, food, and a flashlight? And it doesn’t explain something the family never accepted and which the 2018 fire department report clearly states: “The south wall, including the section where the body was found, was not listed as an area inspected during the initial searches.”
The firefighters said they inspected the south wall. The body was on the south wall, and the body wasn’t found in 2018. It’s possible that the crack, viewed from above or from a side angle, was simply invisible. It’s possible that the firefighters passed meters from the exact spot without noticing the opening covered by vegetation and shadow. It’s possible that the drone, with its 20-minute autonomy and its limited camera, didn’t capture anything relevant in that section. It’s possible. Everything is possible when the terrain is too large, the time is too short, and the resources are too few. But for the Brandão family, this possibility was never enough of an answer. Because possibility is not the same thing as explanation.
An explanation is all a family wants when they spend five years staring at a canyon, hoping it will bring someone back. The investigation by the Civil Police of Tibagi was concluded in March 2024. The responsible delegate classified the case as an accidental death, a fall followed by confinement in a rock crevice, and recommended its closure. The Public Prosecutor’s Office of Paraná accepted the recommendation. The case was closed without indictment, without suspects, without further investigations.
The forensic report was attached to the case file as the main piece of evidence. The cause of death was recorded as undetermined, with the hypothesis of trauma and compression. The cell phone was never found. The backpack remained in the car and was returned to the family along with the keys and belongings that were inside the silver Gol, which spent 5 years in a police impound lot in Tibagi, covered in dust and dry leaves, until Leandro went to retrieve it.
Dona Marilene did not contest the case’s dismissal, did not seek legal counsel, and did not go to the press. When Leandro asked if she wanted to do anything, she said it was pointless. She said her son had already been found and that all that remained was to bury him properly and pray.
The burial took place in the municipal cemetery of Ponta Grossa on an afternoon in November 2023, almost exactly 5 years after the disappearance. Present were Dona Marilene, Leandro, Leandro’s wife, two cousins from Uvaranas, and Davi, Rafael’s best friend. Jéssica was not there. She sent a message to Leandro saying she couldn’t make it. Leandro replied that he understood. The coffin was closed. The priest said few words. The wind from the Campos Gerais region blew dry and constant, raising red dust from the dirt path between the graves.
Dona Marilene stood throughout the entire burial, her purse hanging from her arm and her eyes fixed on the grave. She didn’t cry then. She cried later at home alone, sitting in the same kitchen chair where, five years earlier, she had received the news that the official search had been called off.
There are things that time doesn’t resolve. There are questions that no research can answer. And there are families who learn, not by choice, but by necessity, to live with the emptiness that a person leaves behind when they disappear without explanation and reappear without answers. Dona Marilene Teixeira continues to live in the two-story house in Uvaranas. Rafael’s room remains closed. The boxes are still inside, the trophies, the magazines, the stones he collected as a boy. In the kitchen, near the telephone, there’s a photo of Rafael with his blue backpack on his back, smiling slightly with the Guartelá canyon in the background. The photo is taped to the wall, slightly yellowed by time.
Leandro went back to the workshop, back to work, to paying bills, to taking his children to school. But those who know him say that there are moments in the middle of a job, at lunchtime, in some silence, when he stops, looks at the floor and stays like that for a few seconds, as if he were listening to something that only he can hear. Then he goes back, picks up his tool, and continues.
Jessica rebuilt her life, moved to a different city, and works at a hospital in Londrina. She doesn’t talk about the subject. The Facebook page “Find Rafael Brandão” still exists. The last post is still there, dated 2021: “Three years without an answer, three years of longing.” No one has updated it to say that Rafael was found. Perhaps because, in this case, “finding” didn’t mean what the word normally means. Finding should be relief, it should be an answer, it should be the end of the wait. But when what is found is a body upside down, in a sandstone crevice, trapped for 5 years, 140 meters deep, finding is only the beginning of a different kind of pain.
The Guartelá canyon is still there. The river continues to flow between the dark stones at the bottom. The sandstone walls continue to rise vertically, silent, indifferent. Hikers continue to descend. Tourists continue to take photos at the viewpoint. The park remains open. The crack where Rafael was trapped for 5 years still exists. A narrow opening in the south wall, almost invisible from above, covered by sparse vegetation and shade. Those who pass by see nothing, hear nothing, imagine nothing.
And perhaps that’s what’s most unsettling about this story. It’s not the mystery, it’s not the lack of explanation. It’s the idea that a 26-year-old man who knew that place like the back of his hand, who had climbed up and down those rocks dozens of times, could have fallen into a crevice just a few meters from the surface and remained trapped there upside down, possibly conscious, possibly screaming, while the river muffled any sound and the world above continued spinning. Someone parking their car, someone taking a picture, someone sending a WhatsApp audio message saying it was a beautiful day.
When we close the door at night and know where each person we love is, it’s easy to forget what it means not to know. What does it mean to have a phone that goes to voicemail day after day? What does an empty chair mean at Christmas? What does it mean to look down into a canyon and know that the answer is down there somewhere, but that no one can go deep enough to find it?
The Brandão family waited five years, and when the answer finally came, it brought no relief; it brought a body, an inconclusive report, a closed investigation, and a new silence, different from the previous one, but no less profound. The silence of those who know where the person is, but don’t know what happened. The silence of those who have a grave to visit, but no story to complete. The silence of those who have learned that sometimes finding is just another way of losing.
Rafael Teixeira Brandão’s story doesn’t end with an explanation; it ends with a crack in a rock, with a family that has learned to live with the weight of what remains unresolved, and with a canyon that holds within it things that the world above prefers not to know.
