Where to Stay in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais

What is Belo Horizonte known for?

Belo Horizonte was drawn on paper before it was built, a grid of avenues cut by diagonals inside the ring of Avenida do Contorno. Oscar Niemeyer got his first free hand at Pampulha, where the curved church of São Francisco de Assis stands above the Lagoa da Pampulha. The bars do the rest.

Cheese bread and cachaça come out of the Mercado Central, the old governor's quarter around Praça da Liberdade has been turned into museums, and the mineiro table is taken as seriously here as anywhere in Brazil.

What are the main landmarks in Belo Horizonte?

Belo Horizonte keeps its oldest buildings on the flat and its boldest ones on the lake. Igreja de São Francisco de Assis broke every rule the church had about what a chapel should look like, its concrete vaults tiled by Portinari and its garden laid out by Burle Marx. The Mercado Central is the other pilgrimage.

Catedral de Nossa Senhora da Boa Viagem rises off Avenida Afonso Pena, MM Gerdau fills a Praça da Liberdade palace with the ores of the Quadrilátero Ferrífero, and Museu de Artes e Ofícios occupies the old station on Praça da Estação.

What is the history of Belo Horizonte?

Belo Horizonte began as Curral del Rei, a cattle village on the road out of the gold country, settled while the mines around Ouro Preto were still the reason anyone came to Minas Gerais. The republic wanted a capital of its own. Aarão Reis was given the site in the 1890s, cleared the village almost entirely, and set out a grid crossed by diagonal avenues inside a ring road, with Avenida Afonso Pena running from the Parque Municipal to the hills.

Cidade de Minas opened in 1897. The name Belo Horizonte followed in 1901, and the old capital at Ouro Preto kept its baroque churches and lost its government. The plan filled up faster than it was meant to.

Juscelino Kubitschek, as mayor in the 1940s, commissioned Oscar Niemeyer to build a leisure district around a new reservoir at Pampulha, and the church, casino and yacht club he produced there were the first curved concrete of a career that ended in Brasília. The bishop refused to consecrate the church for years. Iron from the Quadrilátero Ferrífero paid for the towers that swallowed the low houses inside the Contorno, the Mineirão went up in 1965 on the far side of the lake, and Pampulha was written into the UNESCO list in 2016.

Where is Belo Horizonte?

Belo Horizonte fills a bowl in the highlands of Minas Gerais, walled on the south by the ridge of the Serra do Curral. The name came from the view. Ribeirão Arrudas runs under the centre in a channel beside the metro line, the Ribeirão da Onça drains the northern half toward the Rio das Velhas, and the ground climbs from the Pampulha reservoir up to the wooded scarps of the Quadrilátero Ferrífero, whose iron gave the ridge its dark crest.

Ouro Preto lies south beyond the hills.

What is the climate of Belo Horizonte?

Belo Horizonte sits high on the Minas plateau, and the height does most of the cooling. Rain arrives with the wet season and falls hard through the afternoons from spring into early autumn, when the Serra do Curral disappears behind cloud for days at a time. Winter is dry and blue.

Nights cool off properly in the dry months, haze can settle in the bowl by the end of them, and the rains break again over the ridge before the year turns.

How do you get to Belo Horizonte?

Belo Horizonte is reached from the north, where Tancredo Neves International Airport stands on the tableland at Confins, well outside the city. The BR-040 comes down from Brasília and carries on to Rio de Janeiro, the Fernão Dias runs south-west to São Paulo, and the long-distance buses use the rodoviária at Praça Rio Branco beside the old railway station. Trains still run to the coast.

The daily Vitória-Minas service leaves the Estação Central for Espírito Santo, and one metro line follows the Ribeirão Arrudas from Eldorado out to Vilarinho.