🇧🇷 Brazil · Southeast
Belo Horizonte, BH to its friends, is the capital of Minas Gerais and one of the great metropolises of southeastern Brazil. Unlike the colonial towns around it, BH was born from a drawing: it was designed from scratch in the late 19th century to replace Ouro Preto as the state capital, and it opened in 1897 with wide avenues, a grid of blocks and diagonals inspired by Paris and Washington. That planned-city origin is still obvious when you walk down Avenida Afonso Pena or reach Praça da Liberdade.
But what puts it on the traveller's map isn't only the urban planning: it's the Conjunto Moderno da Pampulha (Pampulha Modern Ensemble), declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016. There, around an artificial lake, a young Oscar Niemeyer reinvented Brazilian architecture in the 1940s with reinforced-concrete curves that looked impossible: the Igreja São Francisco de Assis, the Museu de Arte da Pampulha (the old casino), the Casa do Baile and the Iate Clube. It was here, not in Brasília, that Niemeyer and Juscelino Kubitschek began dreaming up modern Brazil.
And then there's the other, tastier side of BH: it's the self-proclaimed capital of the botecos, recognised by UNESCO as a Creative City of Gastronomy. Here mineira food (feijão tropeiro, frango com quiabo, artisan cheeses, pão de queijo, cachaça) is lived in the Mercado Central, in the bars of Savassi and Santa Tereza, and at the Comida di Buteco festival that fills the city every autumn. Add huge parks at the foot of the Serra do Curral and first-rate day trips (Inhotim, Ouro Preto) and you get a destination that delivers far more than its reputation suggests.
Belo Horizonte was Brazil's first planned city: it was born in 1897 on top of the old arraial of Curral del Rei to replace Ouro Preto as the capital of Minas Gerais, and half a century later it became the cradle of modern Brazilian architecture thanks to Niemeyer and Kubitschek's Pampulha. We tell that whole story (from the fazendeiro João Leite to today's metropolis) on the Belo Horizonte history page.
Read the full history ↓The state of gold and the baroque: cradle of the Inconfidência and of Tiradentes, of historic towns such as Ouro Preto and Tiradentes, of pão de queijo and of an artistic heritage —that of Aleijadinho— without equal in Brazil.
Read the history of Minas Gerais →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Belo Horizonte was born twice: first on paper, when a commission of engineers drew the whole thing — avenues, diagonals, squares — before a single building existed; and then in the mud of the building site, when in barely four years a complete capital went up on top of a colonial village that was wiped off the map. But long before the planned city existed, there was already life in the valley at the foot of the Serra do Curral. In the 18th century, during the gold cycle of Minas Gerais, a small settlement formed there, tied to the movement of troops and the supply of the mining districts. The place became known as 'Curral del Rey' (Curral d'El-Rei), a name referring to the region's cattle corrals and to the presence of the Crown ('the king') in these lands. Tradition links the origins of the settlement to a pioneering fazendeiro, João Leite da Silva Ortiz, who established himself in the area and gave impetus to the occupation of the valley.
Unlike the gold-mining towns, boxed in between mountains, Curral del Rey occupied more open, gentler ground, with a good climate, plenty of water and a wide horizon cut by the silhouette of the Serra do Curral. For more than a century it was a quiet arraial of farming and cattle, without the baroque splendour of Ouro Preto or its dense colonial history, but with a geography that in time would prove decisive.
That openness of terrain and its pleasant climate would be precisely the arguments that, in the late 19th century, made the republican planners set their eyes on this corner of Minas. Where the king's cattle had once grazed, the first great designed city in Brazil would rise in a few years. The old arraial of Curral del Rey would disappear almost completely under the layout of the new capital, leaving barely a memory in the name of the serra that still watches over the city's horizon.
The birth of Belo Horizonte is a direct child of the Republic. After the proclamation of 1889, the new republican Brazil wanted to break with the symbols of the Empire and modernize the country. In Minas Gerais, the leadership felt that Ouro Preto, the old capital of the gold cycle, no longer served that project: hemmed in between mountains, with narrow, steep streets and no room to grow, it stood for the colonial past they wanted to leave behind. The idea of moving the capital to a wider, more modern site had been discussed even in imperial times, but it was the Republic that made it happen.
After weighing several locations, the arraial of Curral del Rey was chosen for its climate, its gentle topography and its supply of land and water. Construction was entrusted to a technical commission headed by the engineer Aarão Reis, who designed an entirely new urban plan. Reis took his inspiration from the most modern urban models of the day: the Paris remodelled by Haussmann and, above all, planned cities such as Washington D.C. and La Plata, in Argentina. The result was a rational, geometric layout, conceived from scratch for a 20th-century capital.
The plan organized the city on an orthogonal grid crossed by broad diagonal avenues, with the great Avenida Afonso Pena as its axis and space set aside for the government buildings around the future Praça da Liberdade. Everything was contained within a ring road, the Avenida do Contorno, which marked the boundary of the planned city. It was an ambitious bet: to raise, in a few years and on an almost empty field, an orderly, modern metropolis that would embody the spirit of progress of the new era.
The works advanced at a dizzying pace. In barely four years, on the ground of the old arraial, thousands of workers raised avenues, squares, public buildings, water and sewer networks and the first houses of the new capital. On 12 December 1897, Belo Horizonte was officially inaugurated as the capital of the state of Minas Gerais, replacing Ouro Preto. For a time it was also known as 'Cidade de Minas', until the name Belo Horizonte ('beautiful horizon') took hold, evoking the view of the Serra do Curral that frames the city.
It was the first planned city in Brazil, a milestone in the country's urban history. For the first time a Brazilian capital was not growing spontaneously out of a colonial village but was drawn whole on paper before it existed. That pioneering status turned it into a laboratory of modern urbanism and a direct forerunner of an even more ambitious undertaking half a century later: the construction of Brasília, the national capital, also designed from scratch.
The early years were not easy. A city planned for a future of progress was slow to fill up and to occupy Aarão Reis's ambitious layout; many of the workers who built it, moreover, settled outside the perimeter of the Avenida do Contorno, in districts the plan had not foreseen. But over the course of the 20th century, driven by industrialization, the region's iron mining and its role as capital, Belo Horizonte grew until it far overflowed its original limits and became one of the great metropolises of southeastern Brazil, without entirely losing the mark of that founding plan, still recognizable when you walk down the Avenida Afonso Pena or arrive at the Praça da Liberdade.
If the founding of 1897 put Belo Horizonte on the map of urban planning, it was half a century later that the city wrote its most celebrated chapter in the history of art and architecture. In the early 1940s, the city's then prefeito (mayor), Juscelino Kubitschek — the future president who years later would build Brasília — pushed for a new leisure district around a freshly dammed artificial lake north of the city: Pampulha.
To conceive the buildings of that ensemble, Kubitschek called in a young and still little-known architect: Oscar Niemeyer. It was there, at Pampulha, that Niemeyer first gave free rein to a language of his own, made of free, daring curves in reinforced concrete, breaking with the rigidity of orthodox modern architecture. The works, begun in 1941 and largely inaugurated in 1943, included a casino (today the Museu de Arte da Pampulha), a dance hall (the Casa do Baile), a yacht club (the Iate Clube) and, above all, the Igreja São Francisco de Assis, with its unmistakable parabolic vaults. The ensemble was a collective work: the gardens carry the signature of the landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx and the murals and tiles that of the painter Cândido Portinari.
The church was so radically modern that for years the Catholic Church refused to consecrate it, considering it unsuitable for a place of worship; it was only officially blessed in 1959. Beyond that controversy, Pampulha marked a before and after: it was the laboratory where Niemeyer and Kubitschek tried out the ideas and forms that, years later, would lead to the building of Brasília. In a sense, modern Brazil began to be dreamed here, on the shore of a lake in Belo Horizonte.
As the decades passed, the value of the Pampulha ensemble grew in the eyes of the world. What in the 1940s had been a bold experiment — and even a scandal for the Church — came to be recognized as one of the founding works of 20th-century architectural modernism, not only in Brazil but worldwide. The ensemble was protected (tombado) by IPHAN, the Brazilian heritage body, and restored, in recognition of its historical and artistic importance.
International recognition came on 17 July 2016, when Unesco inscribed the 'Conjunto Moderno da Pampulha' on the World Heritage List, in the cultural landscape category. The listing values the pioneering integration of architecture, visual art, landscape design and natural setting around the lake: the union of Niemeyer's genius, Burle Marx's gardens and Portinari's murals as a total work of art that distils the spirit of the Brazilian modern movement.
Today, Pampulha is the great architectural reason to visit Belo Horizonte and one of the few places in the country where you can walk, in the open air, through the exact moment when modern Brazilian architecture was born. The city that had begun its story as the first planned settlement in Brazil thus added a second world milestone: having been the cradle of an architectural language that, from the Pampulha lake, would project itself towards Brasília and towards the rest of the planet. A planned capital and the cradle of modernism, Belo Horizonte holds in its street plan and in its concrete curves two decisive chapters of Brazil's urban history.