Belo Horizonte

I arrived expecting a stopover — a night before heading up into the colonial towns — and left four days later having eaten more small plates of food off more zinc-topped bars than on any other stretch of the trip. Belo Horizonte does not get written about. That is, I am fairly convinced, a mistake being made by every guidebook currently in print.

The Boteco Circuit

Belo Horizonte’s real cultural export is the boteco: a corner bar, usually open-air, serving ice-cold draft beer (chopp) alongside small savoury plates called tira-gostos. The city claims to have more bars per capita than anywhere else in Brazil, and having spent several evenings testing that claim in the Savassi and Santo Antônio neighbourhoods, I am not inclined to argue. We’d order a round, a plate of torresmo or pastel or the extraordinary bolinho de feijão tropeiro, finish it, and instead of leaving simply walk to the next place. Lia started keeping a tally on her phone. We stopped counting after eleven.

Pampulha and Niemeyer’s First Draft

The other side of Belo Horizonte is architectural, and unexpectedly so. The Pampulha complex, built around an artificial lake in the 1940s, was Oscar Niemeyer’s first major commission and the place where the curves that would later define Brasília were worked out. The Igreja São Francisco de Assis, with its swooping concrete roof and Cândido Portinari tile murals, was so radical when it opened that the archdiocese refused to consecrate it for years. We rented bikes and circled the lagoa at sunset, the church glowing white against a sky going pink, joggers and couples and old men fishing off the shore all sharing the same stretch of water.

The Market That Feeds the Whole City

The Mercado Central is where Belo Horizonte’s food culture concentrates into a single building — cheese stalls stacked with wheels of queijo Minas, cachaça shops with hundreds of bottles from tiny producers, lunch counters serving feijão tropeiro to office workers on their break. We spent an entire morning there, tasting our way through samples until neither of us needed lunch, which did not stop us from having lunch anyway.

When to go: March to May and September to November for pleasant temperatures without peak summer humidity. Belo Horizonte is a year-round city and works well as a base for exploring the historic towns of Minas Gerais.