It was a Friday night in June, and the Mercado Novo, or New Market, in Belo Horizonte was buzzing despite the early-winter chill. Clusters of twenty-somethings, lit by fairy lights strung in the market’s soaring modernist atrium, chatted over craft beer and potent caipirinhas. Tiny storefronts on the upper floors showcased ceramics, clothing, and accessories from young designers alongside the food for which the surrounding state of Minas Gerais is famed.
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 dishes like chewy-crisp cheese-and-corn fritters and silky slices of cow tongue under a pavé of green tomatoes. When Quick opened the restaurant in 2018, the Mercado Novo largely died at night; the vegetable stands and print studios on the first two floors closed and the market failed to take off after its founding in 1962 as an extension of the nearby Central Market. Cozinha Tupís, which sources 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 said, “we decided to start here and see what we can do.”
Belo Horizonte itself was founded in 1897 as Brazil’s first planned city, replacing the baroque capital of Ouro Preto. A walk from my hotel through Praça da Liberdade offered an eclectic snapshot of the city’s 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—and a suite of daring new buildings from the then-emerging architect Oscar Niemeyer. Tracing the lake’s perimeter, I visited Niemeyer’s dance hall, with its sinuous waterfront marquee, and the feather-light Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, its roof a sequence of curved concrete arches. Kubitschek later commissioned Niemeyer to design major buildings for Brasília; the seed of that epoch-defining project was sown here in Minas.
The next afternoon I drove 90 minutes southwest to Inhotim, a museum and botanical garden founded by mining magnate Bernardo Paz in 2006. Paz transformed a former fazenda into a vast showcase for contemporary art, hiring local architecture firms to design galleries and commissioning site-specific projects. Today Inhotim features roughly 700 works by more than 60 artists scattered through 345 acres of gardens. For years visitors had to stay in no-frills pousadas in Brumadinho or make day trips from Belo Horizonte. Paz began a hotel project on the grounds in 2011 but abandoned it and eventually turned the museum over to a private foundation. The half-built complex sat unfinished until June 2023, when chef and hotelier Taiza Krueder bought the property and spent 18 months turning the ruin into Clara Arte, with airy common spaces showing works from Inhotim’s collection and 46 individual villas overlooking the tropical canopy.
Rather than rush Inhotim’s profusion of sensations, I lingered. One morning I slipped into a pavilion devoted to Lygia Pape, where luminous columns of golden wire sliced through darkness like solid light. I walked past Rebeca Carapiá’s cast-iron-and-copper glyphs levitating over a reflective lagoon and discovered a living banana grove planted by Paulo Nazareth, punctuated by a cast-bronze banana tree that seemed to sprout from the mineral-rich soil. Installed among pavilions and works by Yayoi Kusama and Robert Irwin, recent additions reflect Inhotim’s growing dedication to Black and Indigenous artists and a desire to deepen ties to nearby marginalized communities. “Recognizing all the layers of history that make up Inhotim is really important,” said Júlia Rebouças, the museum’s former curator. “Sometimes those layers end up covered over time. We’re trying to discover them now.”
Back in Belo Horizonte, I saw countless projects patiently excavating the past to fortify a regional identity “connected to materials and tradition,” said ceramist Daniel Romeiro, who runs O Ateliê de Céramica from a sleek modernist house with his sister Luiza Soares and their mother, artist Flavia Soares. I scoured 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 Cozinha Santo Antônio, where chef Juliana Duarte uses food as “a way into our history.”
On my last afternoon I met Claudia Dodd and Lucio Lourenzo at their 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 the city. Over sticky-sweet honey bread, Dodd observed, “Mineiros are both very conservative and very forward-looking.” In Brazil, she added, “the vernacular produced modernism—there’s no separation!” Tradition, in Minas Gerais, 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.