Minas Gerais is one of our Best Places to Go in 2026. Read the full list here.
It was a Friday night in June, and the Mercado Novo, or New Market, in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, was buzzing with activity despite the early-winter chill. Clusters of 20-somethings, illuminated by fairy lights strung up high in the building's soaring modernist atrium, chatted over craft beer and potent Caipirinhas. Tiny storefronts lined the narrow aisles of the market's upper floors, showcasing ceramics, clothes, and accessories from young designers and the food for which the surrounding state of Minas Gerais is justly famous.
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Near the back of the market, I met Rafael Quick, a graphic designer and cofounder of the market's culinary flagship, Cozinha Tupís, to taste some of his restaurant's decadent dishes, like chewy-crisp cheese and corn fritters and silky slices of cow tongue under a pavé of green tomatoes. At the time of the restaurant's founding in 2018, Quick told me, the market mostly died at night when the vegetable stands and print studios on the first two floors closed. Founded in 1962 as an extension of the nearby Central Market—itself a dizzying cornucopia of Mineiro cheese, wine, coffee, and crafts—the Mercado Novo never quite took off. Quick's restaurant, which sources its ingredients from the vendors downstairs, helped change that. Within a year of its opening, 100 new businesses had sprung up, transforming the Mercado Novo into an incubator for the cooks, brewers, artists, and designers who make Belo Horizonte, Brazil's sixth-largest city, into one of the country's most vibrant creative hubs. “Instead of looking abroad,” Quick told me that night, “we decided to start here and see what we can do.”
Founded in 1897 as Brazil's first planned city, Belo Horizonte, which replaced the baroque jewel of Ouro Preto as the state capital of Minas, has had both traditionalism and creativity in its DNA from the beginning. A full-day tour of the city's extraordinary architectural heritage revealed both. After waking up at the quietly sumptuous Fasano Belo Horizonte hotel, I joined my guide for a walk through Praça da Liberdade, which offers an eclectic snapshot of the city's rapid-fire evolution from elaborate neoclassicism to rigorous functionalism and a voluptuous high modernism. A 40-minute drive north brought me to Pampulha, a lakeside suburb where in 1941 the ambitious young mayor Juscelino Kubitschek commissioned an urban park, the Pampulha Modern Ensemble, that included a suite of daring new buildings from the legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, then beginning his career. Tracing the perimeter of the lake, I visited Niemeyer's dance hall, with its serpentine waterfront marquee, and the feather-light Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, its sinuous roof a collection of variously sized concrete arches. Once he became Brazil's president, Kubitschek commissioned Niemeyer to design key buildings for Brasília, the nation's new capital and still the world's most extravagant experiment in planned urban modernism. The seed of that epoch-defining project was sown not in Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo but here in Minas.
The next afternoon I left Belo Horizonte to visit another utopian fantasy: the museum and botanical garden known as Inhotim, a 90-minute drive southwest. Mining magnate Bernardo Paz (Minas Gerais means “General Mines,” named for the industry that has supported the state economy since the 17th century) founded Inhotim in 2006 as his own personal Eden, transforming an erstwhile fazenda, or ranch, into a showcase for his burgeoning art collection. Paz let his imagination run wild, hiring emerging local architecture firms like Rizoma and Arquitetos Asociados to design permanent galleries for Claudia Andujar and Tunga, among others. In total, the museum today features some 700 works by more than 60 artists scattered throughout 345 acres of gardens.
Until the end of last year, visitors to Inhotim had to overnight in no-frills pousadas in the nearby town of Brumadinho or drive down from Belo Horizonte for a single day, a laughably insufficient amount of time to digest the museum in its entirety. Though Paz started a hotel project on the museum's grounds in 2011, he abandoned it and eventually turned Inhotim over to a private foundation. The half-built complex festered in the forest until June 2023, when the São Paulo–based chef and hotelier Taiza Krueder bought the property. Over the next 18 months, she transformed Paz's ruin into Clara Arte, with airy common spaces displaying artworks from Inhotim's collection and 46 individual villas overlooking the tropical canopy near the park's entrance.
Rather than rush through Inhotim's profusion of aesthetic experiences, I decided to linger. On my first morning I wandered off the hotel's lush grounds and, in moments, disappeared into a pavilion dedicated to the Brazilian artist Lygia Pape, where luminous columns of golden wire sliced through the sepulchral darkness, like light made solid. That afternoon I strolled past Rebeca Carapiá's cast-iron-and-copper glyphs, which levitated over the reflective surface of a lagoon. Near the park's periphery I slipped into a living banana grove planted by the artist Paulo Nazareth and stumbled upon a single cast-bronze banana tree that seemed to sprout, solid and burnished, from the mineral-rich soil. Installed in 2024 among pavilions and artworks by blue-chip luminaries like Yayoi Kusama and Robert Irwin, these works reflect Inhotim's growing dedication to Black and Indigenous artists and its desire to deepen ties to marginalized communities nearby. “Recognizing all the layers of history that make up Inhotim is really important,” says Júlia Rebouças, Inhotim's former curator. “Sometimes those layers end up covered over time. We're trying to discover them now.”
Returning to Belo Horizonte, I saw countless projects patiently excavating the past to fortify a strong sense of regional identity “connected to materials and tradition,” says the ceramist Daniel Romeiro, who runs the gorgeous O Ateliê de Céramica out of a sleek modernist house with his sister, Luiza Soares, and his mother, the artist Flavia Soares. Over my final days in town, I scoured the stalls at the Mercado Central; visited the workshop of Alva Design, where siblings Marcelo Alvarenga and Susana Bastos craft expressive homewares from locally quarried soapstone; and feasted on Mineiro ingredients at the charming Cozinha Santo Antônio, where chef Juliana Duarte uses food as “a way into our history.”
On my last afternoon in the city, I met Claudia Dodd and Lucio Lourenzo at their exquisite appointment-only furniture gallery, Pé Palito, set in a sun-washed space in the sprawling Conjunto JK apartment complex, one of Niemeyer's last major buildings in Belo Horizonte. “Mineiros are both very conservative and very forward-looking,” Dodd told me, setting down a plate of sticky-sweet honey bread. In Brazil, she said, “the vernacular produced modernism—there's no separation!” Tradition, in other words, is not the opposite of innovation, but its source.
This article appeared in the December 2025 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
