Weekend Getaway – Belo Horzonte

Just a short 8 hour bus ride away from Sao Paulo you arrive in the first planned city in Brazil, Belo Horizonte. Well from looking at the map you can easily see that the city has easily outgrown it’s humble origins and the planned portion encompasses barely a fraction of the current extent of the city.



After arriving in Belo Horizonte, Maren and I attempted to find the bus that would take us to our hostel. You’d think it would be easy making our way around the well laid out grid pattern, but with the diagonal streets that transverse the grid we were soon disoriented and ended up meandering about the town. Luckily our meandering lead us to some cool spots, include the Parque Municipal, which has a small lake where you can rent rowboats. How could we pass that up?



We eventually made it to our hostel and met these two Brazilian guys that joined us in our daylong wandering. With few points of interest mentioned in the Lonely Planet Brazil guidebook we opted to head for the Mercadao, the municipal market for Belo Horizonte. There you can pick up everything including leather goods, cachaça candies or a new puppy. I opted for the candies.

The Mercadao also serves as a gathering spot for people to socialize with friends over beer, so of course we had to join in the fun.




To round off our time in Belo Horizonte, we headed out to Pumpulha. We walked through this cool ecological reserve. Maren had a bit of a mistep and nearly lost her shoe to the receding lake.





This part of town also boasts a museum designed by famed Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. Though we weren’t able to get to the museum we were able to see a cool looking church. But I am still not sure if Oscar Niemeyer designed it.