Minas Gerais' Capital — Oscar Niemeyer's Pampulha, the Mercado Central, and Brazil's Greatest Street-Food City
Belo Horizonte — BH to everyone who lives there — is Brazil's third-largest city and the capital of Minas Gerais, the mountainous inland state whose cuisine (comida mineira) is considered by many food critics the most complex and satisfying in all of Brazil. The Mercado Central, a 1929 iron-and-glass market, houses 400 vendors selling pinhão, queijo Minas, cachaça, and carved wooden saints under one roof. The Pampulha complex — a 1943 lakeside commission that became the turning point of Oscar Niemeyer's career — includes the São Francisco de Assis Church, the Lagoa da Pampulha, and the Mineir…
Belo Horizonte was the first planned city in modern Brazil — laid out on a grid in 1897 to replace Ouro Preto as the Minas Gerais state capital, after the state's colonial baroque capital became too geographically inaccessible for a modernising state administration. The city grew around its planned neoclassical core (now the Centro) and expanded chaotically up the surrounding mountains, creating one of the most dramatically topographic major cities in Brazil. The 1930 Brazilian Revolution began in BH when Getúlio Vargas's forces marched from here to Rio. The Mineirão stadium is where Brazil's…