Belo Horizonte

Sunday 29th May 1988

Breakfast was a noisy affair with the excited school kids. Afterwards we walked up to the Praça Tiradentes where we found everything closed except for the tourist shops. I tried in vain to change a travellers cheque and ended up having to change $20 US dollars cash.

We walked to the Rodoviária de Ouro Preto in time to catch the 11:30 hrs. bus, killing the last fifteen minutes with a walk around the nearby church. A tour guide was explaining that the reason that there were so many churches in Ouro Preto was that there were a lot of very rich people there during the gold rush and they bought “tickets to Heaven” by investing in churches. “Did they get there”? asked one of the party, causing much laughter.

Above: Praça Tiradentes in Ouro Preto.

We talked to an English-speaking Brasilian girl on the one-and-a-half-hour bus trip to Belo Horizonte. She was anxious to move to Europe, disillusioned by Brazilian politics. Belo Horizonte ('Beautiful Horizon') is the first planned modern city in Brazil.

The region was first settled in the early 18th century, but the city as it is known today was planned and constructed in the 1890s, to replace Ouro Preto as the capital of Minas Gerais. The city features a mixture of contemporary and classical buildings, and is home to several modern Brazilian architectural icons, most notably the Pampulha Complex.

In planning the city, Aarão Reis and Francisco Bicalho sought inspiration in the urban planning of Washington, D.C. The city has employed notable programs in urban revitalization and food security, for which it has been awarded international accolades.

The city is built on several hills and is completely surrounded by mountains and there are several large parks in the immediate surroundings of Belo Horizonte. We arrived and went for a walk into the city.

We walked up the main drag, Avenida Afonso Pena, from the Rodoviária. Towering new office blocks and multistorey banks flanked the road. We turned off at the Municipal Park and walked down Avenida João Pinheiro to the Praça da Liberdade where they were just dismantling the Sunday market. Cleaners attacked the mountains of litter left behind.

On our way back we looked at the exhibition lithography (printing) and cartography in the Mineiro Museum and then went into the Parque Municipal which is billed as one of Beagá's most appealing spots, this enormous sea of tropical greenery with artificial lakes and winding pathways is just 10 minutes southeast of the bus station. It's especially fun on Sunday when everyone's out strolling and socializing.

Here we did indeed find crowds of people out for some Sunday afternoon diversion. There was a funfair where we watched small children concentrating intensely as they tried to master the controls of the bumper cars.

Other people were on the boating lakes, donkey rides, promenades and the children’s playground where heavily muscled black men did pull-ups amongst the excited kids at play. Girls walked around dressed in their best clothes and boys with portable radios blaring tried to chat them up.

Back at the Rodoviária we ate cheese sandwiches and drank beer until my bus to Brasília departed at 19:00 hrs. I waved goodbye to Uli who still had two hours to wait for his bus. It was dark and I was tired, so I saw little of the passing terrain. What I did see appeared to be a monotonous vista of low trees, grassy plains and red earth.