Weekend Getaway—Ouro Preto

Belo Horizonte is the third largest city in Brazil, and though I am sure there are plenty of points of interest, we didn’t find many. But one of the biggest claims to fame for Belo Horizonte is that it’s the gateway to some very cool old mining towns. Maren and I got a chance to visit Ouro Preto, which means black gold. The UN has named the city a World Heritage Site. This designation basically means that everything in the city must be frozen in time, or at least their façades have to. Maren and I toured more churches than I can remember and it seemed that every few feet we stopped to snap some photos. It’s hard to resist when the entire town can be made into a postcard. Well I would try to describe all the sites that we saw, but I can’t remember them all, so I’ll just post the pics that best captured our visit. Though unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take any pictures of the churches from the inside, which is a shame since some of them were exquisite with gold leaf baroque adornments and walls and ceiling paintings depicting biblical scenes. Of course I should also mention the various statues that were made with real human hair, well lonely planet thought it was interesting.
















A cool bit of Ouro Preto history is that there was a guy named Chico Rey who was an African king that had been captured along with his whole tribe and sold to work in the mines in Ouro Preto. Apparently he managed to earn enough money to buy his freedom and worked to free his entire tribe. The Church of Santa Efigenia is one of the last bits that remain of this history. Unfortunately we got there when it was closed.



One last bit of trivia, apparently Ouro Preto had a bought with phantom robbers. So the townspeople built this shrines that were intended to scare away these ghosts. I have to say I was sadly disappointed when I came across one of these few remaining shrines. Maybe they were more impressive at one time….maybe.