Sunny Brazil: Belo Horizonte

Belo Horizonte (or Schöne Aussicht in German, or Beautiful Horizon in English) is the capital of the Minas Gerais state in Brazil. As it’s a quite big name and we’re lazy, we normally just called it “BH”. It's my beloved city, where I grew up and lived for the longest time (Mitza here)! 

Well, BH is a young city; it was planned and built in 1897 to be the capital of the state. Over 2,5 million people live in here. The also called “big BH” includes other cities in the surrounding area and the population then rises to 4,8 million inhabitants. UNO considers BH the city with the best quality of life in the entire Latin America. We belo-horizontinos are usually quite happy living here, but we also say that the only problem is the lack of ocean, otherwise it would be just perfect. When compared to other big cities, such as London or São Paulo, BH is still “small”, because life here is still quieter, the people are not so stressed, not so indifferent and also, the distances are not as problematic as in London that it takes you forever to go from one point to the other.

As you can see in the map bellow, BH is located in the Southeast part of Brazil. Although it seems like it’s quite close to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, those cities are already far away: 440 Km and 580 Km. You have to think that Brazil is probably the size of Europe and my state (Minas Gerais) is probably the size of Germany. Therefore, it’s always a longer trip when we want to travel to the coast!

Enough with boring numbers! What are we famous for? Mountains, food, hospitality (yes, we are very friendly people!) and accent (yes, we do speak like we’re singing!).

The topography of the entire city is mainly with mountains, some parts with higher hills than others. A little bit hard to ride a bike, depending where you want to go! The Serra do Curral (mountains) dominates the view in almost every post card. From up there, BH can be seen as a concrete jungle with hundreds of tall buildings, probably more than in the entire Germany. They exist thanks to the less and less space to live in the city center and the search for a more peaceful living without robbers.

Belo Horizonte and Serra do Curral

The food not only in BH, but in Minas Gerais is very unique, and by “food” I include here the habits that come with it, such as drinking coffee or beer. The pão de queijo (cheese breads, for those who have visited us and I made this while living in Germany), cheese, several types of cakes, cookies, food with lots of meat and beans (like the famous feijão tropeiro) which Sven normally looks and makes a bad face not being brave enough to try it. We also have all sorts of food made with corn: sweet corn cake, pamonha, curau, polenta etc.They’re all very yammy! (I can already imagine my husband’s bad face reading about it)! J Especially outside of BH, the hostess have the habits of offering a cup of coffee with cheese for the visitors; and in the really small villages, some people might get a bit offended if the visitor refuses to eat and drink what they offer. So make sure to eat and drink as much as you can when you’re travelling around here!

                                  Pão de Queijo                                                         Feijão Tropeiro

                                       

       Bolo de Milho                                                         Polenta Frita

                                     

Pamonha

  Curau 

 Also, as we don’t have an ocean and “nothing better to do”, we go to pubs quite regularly to drink beer and eat Brazilian tapas (tira-gosto) or barbecue (churrasco) with our friends. That is a very strong tradition! BH is very known for its bars: it’s the city with the highest number of pubs per citizen than any other big city in the country. Because of that, it was created a few years ago a yearly pub competition called Comida di Buteco, in which a certain ingredient it’s given and the pubs compete between themselves with their “tira-gosto” that include that ingredient. People then vote for the best pub.

All in all, BH is a green city with trees everywhere (something I really miss living in London…) of the famous Pampulha area (next post) and its modern architecture style buildings (some of Oscar Niemeyer’s most famous projects were built in here) of pubs that bring friends together, of beautiful and friendly people that welcome all its visitors and try to make their holidays the best possible ones!! Below, some more pictures of Belo Horizonte:

With Lilian and Daniel up in the mountains and the city in the back

Liberty Square

Also at the Liberty Square

Pope Square and the city in the back

Central Metro Station

Parque Municipal

Praça Sete de Setembro

Savassi Area

Pampulha Lake and São Francisco de Assis Church (a preview of the next post)

Sunday Market at the Afonso Pena Avenue ("Feira Hippie")

To all our friends, I hope you enjoyed this post and that I could make you curious enough to schedule a trip to Belo Horizonte soon!!