Brazil · Fine silver and gold horse-tack and gaucho ornament making
Prataria Gaúcha
The casting, chasing, and engraving of silver and gold into gaúcho horse-tack and personal adornment — stirrups, spurs, breastplates, bridles, knives, mates, and rastras (belt buckles) — a Rio Grande do Sul tradition whose 19th-century golden age is directly documented by French nobleman Luís Felipe Gastão d'Orléans (Conde D'Eu), who described Pelotas's Rua de São Miguel as lined continuously with silver shops displaying stirrups, enormous spurs, breastplates, and bridles 'all in silver, exhibiting a dazzling splendor' rivaling Genoa's own historic goldsmiths' street. Unlike the closely related and better-documented Argentine gaucho silversmithing tradition, Rio Grande do Sul's own prataria gaúcha is specifically documented as having declined to a near-total 'agonizing' state by the end of the 20th century — a gap not yet fully understood, though linked by contemporary historians to the postwar global ascendance of American cultural style. Its contemporary revival is anchored by named master Raul Sartor Filho, who founded the Escola de Artes Santo Elói in Bento Gonçalves in 2017; more than twenty students passed through the school in its first two years, and in a specifically documented act of collective craft stewardship, students donated their accumulated silver filings — waste byproduct from their individual training pieces — to be purified and recast by Mestre Raul into finished works, with proceeds from their sale directed to charity.
Risk level: Endangered · Not Applicable — no UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage inscription exists for this craft at time of writing
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