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municipality of Minas Gerais state, Brazil
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Belo Horizonte is the sixth-largest city in Brazil, with a population of around 2.4 million, and the third largest metropolitan area, containing a population of 6 million. It is the 13th-largest city in South America and the 18th-largest in the Americas. The metropolis is anchor to the Belo Horizonte metropolitan area, ranked as the third most populous metropolitan area in Brazil and the 17th most populous in the Americas. Belo Horizonte is the capital of the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil's second-most populous state. It 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. There are several large parks in the surroundings of Belo Horizonte. The Mangabeiras Park (Parque das Mangabeiras), 6 km (4 mi) southeast of the city centre in the hills of Curral Ridge (Serra do Curral), has a broad view of the city. It has an area of 2.35 km2 (580 acres), of which 0.9 km2 (220 acres) is covered by the native forest. The Jambreiro Woods (Mata do Jambreiro) nature reserve extends over 912 hectares (2,250 acres), with vegetation typical of the Atlantic Forest. More than 100 species of birds inhabit the reserve, as well as 10 species of mammals.
Belo Horizonte was one of the host cities of the 1950 and the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Additionally, the city shared as host of the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup and the football tournament during the 2016 Summer Olympics.
The metropolis was once a small village, founded by João Leite da Silva Ortiz, a bandeirante explorer from São Paulo. The explorer settled in the region in 1701, leading a gold rush expedition. He then established a farm called "Curral d'el Rey," archaic Portuguese for the "King's Corral". The farm's wealth and success encouraged people from surrounding places to move into the region, and Curral del Rey became a village surrounded by farms.
Another important factor contributing to the growth of the village was people migrating from the São Francisco River region, who had to pass through Curral d'el Rey to reach southern parts of Brazil. Travelers usually visited a small wooden chapel, where they prayed for a safe trip, so the chapel was named Capela da Nossa Senhora da Boa Viagem, which means "Chapel of Our Lady of the Good Journey." After the construction of Belo Horizonte, the old baroque chapel was replaced by a neo-Gothic church that became the city's cathedral.
The previous capital of Minas Gerais, Ouro Preto (meaning "black gold," due to dark rocks with gold inside found on the region), originally called "Vila Rica" ("wealthy village"), was a symbol of both the monarchic Brazilian Empire and the period when most of Brazilian income was from the mining industry. That never pleased the members of the Inconfidência Mineira, republican intellectuals who conspired against the Portuguese dominion of Brazil.
In 1889 Brazil became a republic, and it was agreed that a new state capital, in tune with a modern and prosperous Minas Gerais, had to be established. In 1893 due to the climatic and topographic conditions, Curral Del Rey was selected by Minas Gerais governor Afonso Pena among other cities as the location for the new economic and cultural center of the state, under the new name of Cidade de Minas, or City of Minas.
Aarão Reis, an urbanist from Pará, was then chosen to design the second planned city of Brazil after Teresina. Cidade de Minas was inaugurated in 1897, with many unfinished buildings as the Brazilian government set a deadline for its completion. The local government encouraged growth through subsidies. It offered free lots and funding for building houses. An interesting feature of Reis' downtown street plan for Belo Horizonte was the inclusion of a symmetrical array of perpendicular and diagonal streets named after Brazilian states and Brazilian indigenous tribes.
In 1906 the name was changed to Belo Horizonte, which translates to "Beautiful Horizon" in English. The city's name is derived from the surrounding Curral del Rey Mountains, which create a visually striking, hilly ridge that appears as a "beautiful horizon" when viewed from the city. At that time, the city was experiencing a considerable industrial expansion that increased its commercial and service sectors. From its very beginning, the city's original plan prohibited workers from living inside the urban area, which was defined by Avenida do Contorno (a long avenue that goes around the city's central areas). Reserved for government workers (hence the name of the trendy neighbourhood "Funcionários"), and bringing about an accelerated occupation outside the city's area well provided with infrastructure since its very beginning. Naturally, the city's original planners did not count on its ongoing population growth, which proved especially intense in the last 20 years of the 20th century.
In the 1940s a young Oscar Niemeyer designed the Pampulha Neighbourhood to great acclaim, a commission he got thanks to then-mayor and soon-to-be-president Juscelino Kubitschek. These two men are largely responsible for the wide avenues, large lakes, parks, and jutting skylines that characterize the city today. A 1949 American government film favorably reviewed the planning and building of the city.
Belo Horizonte is fast becoming a regional center of commerce. The Latin American research and development center of Google, situated in Belo Horizonte, was responsible for the management and operation of the former social networking website Orkut. It continues to be a trendsetter in the arts, particularly where music, literature, architecture, and the avant garde are concerned.
The term "Grande BH" ("Greater Belo Horizonte") denotes any of various definitions for the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte. The legally defined Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte consists of 34 municipalities in total, and a population of around six million inhabitants (as of 2021, according to Brazil's National Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE)).
The intense process of urbanization that is taking place in the metropolitan region has made some of the political boundaries between municipalities in the region obsolete. The city is now composed of a relatively contiguous urban area, centred on Belo Horizonte, which extends out into municipalities such as Contagem, Betim, Nova Lima, Raposos, Ribeirão das Neves, Ibirité, Santa Luzia and Sabará, among others. The municipality is bounded to the north by Vespasiano, to the north east by Santa Luzia, by Sabará to the east, by Nova Lima to the southeast, Brumadinho to the south and Ribeirão das Neves, Contagem and Ibirité to the west.
According to the current geographic classification by IBGE, the municipality belongs to the Immediate Geographic Region of Belo Horizonte, in the Intermediate Geographic Region of Belo Horizonte.
Belo Horizonte lies on a region of contact between different geological series of the Proterozoic. The geology largely comprises crystalline rocks, which give rise to the varied morphology of the landscape. It is located in a large geological unit known as the craton of São Francisco, referring to extensive crustal nucleus of central-eastern Brazil, tectonically stable at the end of the Paleoproterozoic and bordering areas that suffered the regeneration at the Neoproterozoic.
The archean rocks members of Belo Horizonte complex and supracrustal sequences of the Paleoproterozoic is predominant. The area of Belo Horizonte complex includes the geomorphological unit called Depression of Belo Horizonte, which represents about 70% of the municipality area and has its greatest expression in the northern Ribeirão Arrudas pipeline. The metasedimentary rocks has its area of occurrence on the south of Ribeirão Arrudas pipeline, constituting about 30% of the area of Belo Horizonte. The characteristics of this area are lithological diversities and rugged topography, which has its maximum expression in the Serra do Curral (Corral Ridge), the southern boundary of the municipality.
Its soil comprises a succession of layers of rocks of varied composition, represented by itabirite, dolomite, quartzite, phyllites and schists different from the general direction northwest–southeast and dip to the southeast. The hills of Belo Horizonte are part of the Espinhaço Mountains and belong to the larger Itacolomi mountain chain. The highest point in the municipality is in the Serra do Curral, reaching 1,538 metres (5,046 ft).
A centre for conservation and preservation of animals and plants it has also developed environmental education projects. The Zoo, which encompasses a total area of 1.4 million square meters, is located at the Foundation's headquarters and is regarded as one of the most complete in Latin America. It has a collection of close to 900 animals representing 200 species, from Brazil and other parts of the world, as well as the first public butterfly sanctuary in South America.
Pampulha Ecological Park is administered by the Zoo-Botanical Foundation of Belo Horizonte and was inaugurated on May 21, 2004. It is 30 acres (12 ha) of green area that offers to the population and the tourists a permanent programming of environmental, cultural and patrimonial education.
The city contains the 102 hectares (250 acres) Baleia State Park, created in 1988 but still not implemented as of 2014. It contains part of the 3,941 hectares (9,740 acres) Serra do Rola-Moça State Park, created in 1994.
Due to its inland location, 500 kilometres (310 mi) from the Atlantic Ocean, and elevation of 852 m (2,795 ft), Belo Horizonte has a Köppen climate classification of a tropical savanna climate (Aw). Summers are humid and rainy, but milder than those in nearby, lower-altitude cities, and winters are dry and sunny. The coldest month is generally July, with a lowest recorded temperature of 3.1 °C (38 °F), and the hottest month is usually January.
According to the 2022 census, there were 2,315,560 people residing in the city of Belo Horizonte. The census revealed the following numbers: 1,008,878 White people (43.6%), 986,302 Pardo (Multiracial) people (42.6%), 312,920 Black people (13.5%), 4,881 Asian people (0.2%), 2,486 Amerindian people (0.1%).
In 2010, the city had 428,893 opposite-sex couples and 1,090 same-sex couples. The population of Belo Horizonte was 53.1% female and 46.9% male.
The Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte, called Greater Belo Horizonte, is the 3rd most populous of Brazil, after only Greater São Paulo (with 19,672,582 people, first in Brazil and 5th in the world) and Greater Rio de Janeiro (with 14,387,000 people). The city is the 6th most populous of the country.
During the 18th century, Minas Gerais received many Portuguese immigrants, mainly from Northern Portugal as well as many enslaved Africans. Belo Horizonte has a notable Italian influence; around 30% of the city's population have some Italian origin. The Italian culture is present in the cuisine, dance, and language. People of German, Spanish, French, and Syrian-Lebanese ancestries also make up sizeable groups.
Source: IBGE 2022.
The Catholic Church includes the territory of the municipality of Belo Horizonte and 28 other municipalities in the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of Belo Horizonte, which has Divinópolis, Luz, Oliveira and Sete Lagoas as suffragan dioceses. The archbishop's see is in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Boa Viagem. Some of the churches in Belo Horizonte have great artistic value, especially the Church of São Francisco de Assis, in Pampulha. The church's architectural design was by Oscar Niemeyer and its structural calculations were by Joaquim Cardoso. Its interior houses the Stations of the Cross, made up of 14 panels by Cândido Portinari, considered one of his most significant works. The external panels are by Cândido Portinari (figurative panel) and Paulo Werneck (abstract panel). The gardens were designed by Burle Marx. Alfredo Ceschiatti sculpted the bronze bas-reliefs in the baptistery. Other shrines worth mentioning are the Basilica of Our Lady of Lourdes with its neo-Gothic style, in the Lourdes neighborhood; the Church of São José, in the hypercenter and the Church of São Judas Tadeu, in the Graça neighborhood. The Catholic Church recognizes Our Lady of Boa Viagem as the city's patron saint.
In 1993, under mayor Patrus Ananias de Souza, the city started a series of innovations based on its citizens having the "right to food." These include, for example, creating farmers' markets in the town to enable direct sales and regularly surveying market prices and posting the results across the city. The city's process of participatory budgeting was linked with these innovations, as a result of which the infant mortality rate was reduced by 50% in a decade.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Belo Horizonte”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.