On a cool Friday night in June, the Mercado Novo in Belo Horizonte hummed with life. Fairy lights strung across the market’s airy modernist atrium lit clusters of twenty-somethings sharing craft beer and strong caipirinhas. Small shops on the upper levels displayed ceramics, clothing and accessories by young designers alongside the region’s celebrated foods.
Near the back of the market I met Rafael Quick, a graphic designer who cofounded Cozinha Tupís, the market’s culinary flagship. When Quick opened the restaurant in 2018, the Mercado Novo had long been dim after dark: vegetable stalls and print studios on the lower floors shuttered, and the market never quite fulfilled the promise of its 1962 founding as an extension of the Central Market. Cozinha Tupís, sourcing ingredients from vendors downstairs, helped change that. Within a year of opening, about 100 new businesses sprang up, turning the Mercado Novo into an incubator for cooks, brewers, artists and designers that now make Belo Horizonte a lively creative center. “Instead of looking abroad,” Quick told me, “we decided to start here and see what we can do.”
Belo Horizonte itself was planned and built as Brazil’s first planned city in 1897, replacing the baroque seat of Ouro Preto. A stroll from my hotel through Praça da Liberdade revealed an architectural timeline—elaborate neoclassical facades giving way to strict functionalism and a bold high modernism. About 40 minutes north sits Pampulha, a lakeside district where, in 1941, the then-mayor Juscelino Kubitschek commissioned an urban park and a suite of daring buildings from the young Oscar Niemeyer. Walking the lake’s edge, I visited Niemeyer’s sinuous dance hall and the feather-light Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, whose curved concrete roofs feel like waves. Kubitschek would later summon Niemeyer to Brasília; the ambitions of that national project were planted here in Minas.
A 90-minute drive southwest brings you to Inhotim, the sprawling museum and botanical garden that mining magnate Bernardo Paz created beginning in 2006 by transforming a former fazenda. Local architecture studios designed many of the pavilions, and site-specific commissions populate 345 acres of gardens: roughly 700 works by more than 60 artists are installed across the grounds. Paz initiated a hotel project in 2011 but abandoned it and ultimately placed the museum under a private foundation; the half-completed complex lingered unfinished until June 2023, when chef and hotelier Taiza Krueder purchased the site. Over 18 months she turned the ruin into Clara Arte, a low-key hotel with airy communal spaces displaying works from Inhotim’s collection and 46 individual villas overlooking the tropical canopy.
At Inhotim I slowed my pace to absorb the contrasts. In a dim pavilion devoted to Lygia Pape, columns of golden wire cut through darkness like shafts of light. Rebeca Carapiá’s cast-iron-and-copper glyphs seemed to float above a reflective lagoon. Paulo Nazareth planted a living banana grove interrupted by a cast-bronze banana tree that rises from the mineral-rich soil. Scattered among these newer commissions are pieces by international figures such as Yayoi Kusama and Robert Irwin. Recent acquisitions and programs show a clear effort to highlight Black and Indigenous artists and to deepen connections with 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 encountered designers and makers excavating the past to reinforce a regional identity “connected to materials and tradition,” as ceramist Daniel Romeiro put it. I explored stalls at the Mercado Central, visited O Ateliê de Cerâmica, run by Romeiro with his sister Luiza Soares and their mother, artist Flavia Soares, and walked into the Alva Design workshop, where siblings Marcelo Alvarenga and Susana Bastos craft expressive homewares from locally quarried soapstone. At Cozinha Santo Antônio, chef Juliana Duarte uses Mineiro ingredients to tell stories about place and history, treating food as “a way into our history.”
On my final afternoon I visited Pé Palito, an appointment-only furniture gallery run by Claudia Dodd and Lucio Lourenzo, set in a sunlit space within Conjunto JK, one of Niemeyer’s last major housing complexes in the city. Over sticky-sweet honey bread, Dodd observed an essential paradox: “Mineiros are both very conservative and very forward-looking.” In Brazil, she added, “the vernacular produced modernism—there’s no separation!” In Minas Gerais, tradition isn’t opposed to innovation; it is its source.
From markets to museums, workshops to restaurants, Minas Gerais feels like a place where craft, design and architecture are in constant dialogue. The region’s makers and institutions are reworking history and materials into contemporary forms—a quiet but powerful renaissance that makes Minas a rewarding destination for anyone interested in how tradition fuels creative invention.