Belo Horizonte travel guide

Top 10 sights in Belo Horizonte

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1. 

   1© Rodrigo Lima/Portal da Copa · CC BY 2.0

   Mineirão

   A stadium of 1965 holding sixty thousand, rebuilt for the 2014 World Cup — in which Brazil lost to Germany here by seven goals to one, a result the country refers to simply as the Mineirazo. Its outer colonnade is a protected modernist structure.

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2. 

   2© Py4nf · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Pampulha

   The district around an artificial lake north of the city, where the mayor Juscelino Kubitschek commissioned Niemeyer, Burle Marx and Portinari in the 1940s to build a leisure complex. The result was Brazilian modernism's first mature statement and became World Heritage in 2016.

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3. 

   3© Bernardo Gouvêa · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Church of Saint Francis of Assisi

   Niemeyer's chapel of 1943, four parabolic concrete vaults in a row with Portinari's tiled mural of St Francis across the outer wall. The church refused to consecrate it for fourteen years on the grounds that it did not look like a church, which is why the building matters.

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4. 

   4© MICHELLE TAMIETTI · CC BY 3.0

   Praça da Liberdade

   A square laid out between 1895 and 1897 as the ceremonial centre of a new state capital, with the former government palace at the head and the ministries down both sides. Those buildings now hold museums, so the whole square works as one cultural circuit.

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5. 

   5© Andrevruas · CC BY-SA 3.0

   praça Diogo de Vasconcelos

   The square at the heart of the Savassi district, where the city's two main diagonals meet, and the centre of Belo Horizonte's restaurant and bar life. It was the site of the bakery whose owner's mispronounced name gave the district its own.

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6. 

   6© Andrevruas · CC BY 3.0

   Savassi

   A district in the south-centre of the city, dense with bars, cafés and restaurants, and where the professional class of Belo Horizonte eats and drinks. The name comes from a bakery sign that locals misread and never corrected.

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7. 

   7© Adilmargs · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Praça Sete de Setembro

   The central crossing of the city's two great avenues, marked by an obelisk, and the point from which the 1897 plan radiates. Political rallies, street carnival blocks and evening buskers all converge on it.

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8. 

   8© Bernardo Gouvêa · CC BY 3.0

   Praça Rui Barbosa

   A square beside the central station, laid out with the city and holding its first public clock. It fills for the street carnival, which in Belo Horizonte has grown into one of the largest in Brazil.

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9. 

   9© No machine-readable author provided. Cidcn assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY 2.5

   Mineirinho

   The largest indoor arena in Brazil, seating twenty-five thousand, designed by Niemeyer and opened in 1980 beside the football stadium. Volleyball and basketball fill it, and so do the concerts that will not fit anywhere else in Minas.

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10. 

    10

    Praça Raul Soares

    A circular square in the centre where the axes of the 1897 grid converge, named after a state governor, with a fountain at the middle and rows of trees around it. It is the pivot of the downtown street plan.

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1. 

   1© DavidStarIsrael7 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Lagoinha Church

   A Baptist megachurch in the Lagoinha district with campuses across the city and a broadcasting operation to match — a scale of evangelical church that has reshaped Brazilian public life since the 1990s.

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2. 

   2© Sintegrity · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Niemeyer building

   A curved apartment block by Niemeyer facing the Praça da Liberdade, designed in the 1950s and finished in 1960, whose ribbon of balconies forms one whole side of the square. People still live in it.

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3. 

   3© Paulo SP/ Wikimedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Basilica of Our Lady of Lourdes, Belo Horizonte

   A neo-Gothic church built with the new city in the early twentieth century, its French stained glass shipped out for the purpose. It stands in the Savassi district and was raised to basilica rank in 1958.

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4. 

   4© Rafael Lemieszek Pinheiro · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Pampulha art museum

   Niemeyer's casino of 1943 on the Pampulha lake, closed when Brazil banned gambling in 1946 and turned into an art museum. The glass walls, marble ramp and mirrored dance floor survive, so the building is the exhibit as much as the collection.

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5. 

   5© Sudhertzen · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Christ the King Cathedral, Belo Horizonte

   The cathedral of the Belo Horizonte archdiocese, on a hill north of the centre, built in the later twentieth century in exposed concrete and still unfinished in parts. It replaced the small Boa Viagem church that had served as cathedral since 1897.

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6. 

   6© Gabriel Caldeira · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Serra do Rola-Moça State Park

   A state park on the ridges south of the city where Atlantic forest meets the dry cerrado, so both floras grow side by side. Its lookouts take in Belo Horizonte on one side and the iron mines of the Quadrilátero Ferrífero on the other.

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7. 

   7© Msicoli · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Saint Joseph Church (Belo Horizonte)

   An eclectic church in the centre, built with the new city and mixing Gothic revival with neo-Manueline detail from Portugal. Its two towers close a downtown block and it is now an archdiocesan sanctuary.

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   8

   Palácio das Mangabeiras (corrigir foto)

   The state governor's residence, designed by Niemeyer and finished in 1955 at the end of Kubitschek's term, set low in the woods at the foot of the Curral range so that the roofline follows the ridge behind it.

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9. 

   9© Bernardo Gouvêa · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Centro

   The central district of a city that was designed on paper in 1895 and built in two years, with a grid crossed by diagonal avenues inside a ring road. The plan is still legible in the squares where the diagonals meet.

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10. 

    10© pratiproy · CC BY 2.0

    Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of Black Men (Sabará)

    A church at Sabará begun in the eighteenth century by a brotherhood of enslaved and free Black Catholics, and never finished — the walls and columns stand roofless. The unfinished state is now read as the record of who was and was not allowed to complete things.

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