Belo Horizonte

The area was first settled in the early 18th century, when the bandeirante João Leite da Silva Ortiz founded a farming village known as Curral del Rey, around a chapel of Our Lady of the Good Journey. For almost two centuries it remained small, while the gold towns of the mountains to the south-east, Ouro Preto first among them, held the wealth and the government of Minas Gerais.

After Brazil became a republic in 1889, the state wanted a new capital that looked to the future rather than the colonial past. In 1893 Governor Afonso Pena chose Curral del Rey for its climate and terrain, and the engineer Aarão Reis drew up a plan inspired by Washington, D.C.: a grid of streets crossed by diagonal avenues, ringed by the Avenida do Contorno. The new capital, inaugurated in 1897 as Cidade de Minas with many buildings unfinished, later took the name Belo Horizonte. The plan made no room for the workers who built it.

In the 1940s the mayor Juscelino Kubitschek, later the president who built Brasília, commissioned the young Oscar Niemeyer to design a leisure district around a new lake at Pampulha, with gardens by Roberto Burle Marx and art by Candido Portinari. The city grew fastest in the late 20th century and is now the centre of Brazil's third-largest metropolitan area. In 2010 the state government moved to a new administrative city in the north, freeing the buildings of Praça da Liberdade for museums, and in 2016 the Pampulha Modern Ensemble became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Belo Horizonte calls itself the capital of neighbourhood bars, and the claim is taken seriously. Its botecos — small, informal bars with tables on the pavement — are where friends meet after work, and every year since 1999 the Comida di Buteco contest has had bars competing over snacks, judged by a jury and a public vote. The ritual of beer, cachaça and shared plates is central to how people here spend their evenings.

Music runs deep. From the mid-1960s Milton Nascimento, Lô Borges and their friends formed the Clube da Esquina, one of the most important movements in Brazilian popular music, and the city later became known as the Brazilian capital of heavy metal, the home of Sepultura and many bands of the 1980s. The Palácio das Artes, the Praça da Liberdade cultural circuit, opened in 2010, and the Pampulha Art Museum give the city a busy cultural calendar.

Football divides families. Atlético Mineiro, now in their own Arena MRV since 2023, and Cruzeiro, at the Mineirão, are fierce rivals, and the derby between them is the biggest date in the local calendar; América Mineiro is the third club. The city also carries the memory of the 2014 World Cup semi-final at the Mineirão, when Brazil lost 7–1 to Germany. Around 30 per cent of residents have some Italian ancestry, part of a mix that also includes Portuguese, African and other roots.

About 2.3 million people lived in the city at the 2022 census, and around six million in the metropolitan region of 34 municipalities, which spreads continuously into Contagem, Betim, Nova Lima, Santa Luzia and others. The population is almost evenly split between people who described themselves as white and as pardo, mixed race, with a substantial Black minority.

The economy rests on state government, services, commerce, universities and health care, with heavy industry nearby: the Fiat plant at Betim is in the metropolitan area. The city has also built up a biotechnology sector and become a national hub for business tourism.

Life is divided between the planned centre inside the Contorno, with its apartment blocks, offices and older districts, and the vast outer city, where most people live and commute by bus. Savassi, near the centre, is among the most sought-after districts. Traffic is heavy, the metro is limited to a single line, and extensions have been planned for years. Lunch is the main meal, and evenings and weekends turn towards the bars.

Belo Horizonte is the best place to eat comida mineira in a city setting. The farmhouse cooking of the state — beans with cassava flour, pork in many forms, couve greens, angu cornmeal — turns up at self-service lunch restaurants and in the snacks of the botecos. Bar food is a cuisine of its own here, from torresmo, crisp pork crackling, to the dishes invented each year for the Comida di Buteco contest.

Pão de queijo, small cheese breads made with cassava starch, are eaten all day, and Minas cheese, from fresh queijo Minas to aged artisanal cheeses, is a point of pride, along with doce de leite and goiabada, guava paste, often eaten with cheese as "Romeu e Julieta". The Mercado Central in the city centre, the city's food hall, is the place to find them.

Cachaça, the cane spirit, is the drink of the state, and the city's shops and bars stock artisanal brands from producers across Minas. Savassi, Lourdes, Santa Tereza, the area around the Mercado Central and the Pampulha lakeside hold most of the restaurants and bars, from simple botecos to more formal dining.