Belo Horizonte was planned in the 1890s as a new capital
Brazil's sixth-largest city, with about 2.4 million residents and the country's third-largest metro area, Belo Horizonte was surveyed and built in the 1890s to replace an older Minas Gerais capital. Hills ring the planned grid that later hosted World Cup matches in 1950 and 2014.
Settlement in the region dates to the early eighteenth century, but the city as known today is a republican-era planned capital. Designers laid streets across rolling terrain completely surrounded by mountains, leaving room for large peripheral parks that still define leisure geography.
Population near 2.4 million places it sixth among Brazilian municipalities, while the metro ranking third signals sprawling commuting sheds. FIFA chose the city for the 1950 and 2014 World Cups, and it also shared hosting duties for the 2013 Confederations Cup, embedding stadium infrastructure in civic identity. The legally defined metropolitan region spans 34 municipalities and roughly six million people as of 2021, and the city also staged football at the 2016 Olympics.
The seed was a farm called Curral d'el Rey, the King's Corral, set up in 1701 by the São Paulo explorer João Leite da Silva Ortiz during a gold rush; travellers from the São Francisco valley prayed at its wooden chapel of Our Lady of Good Voyage. After Brazil became a republic in 1889, governor Afonso Pena chose the site in 1893 to replace Ouro Preto, a symbol of empire and mining wealth. Aarão Reis designed Brazil's second planned city after Teresina, and Cidade de Minas opened in 1897 with many buildings unfinished. It took the name Belo Horizonte, beautiful horizon, in 1906 after the surrounding ridge. In the 1940s mayor Juscelino Kubitschek gave a young Oscar Niemeyer the Pampulha commission, and the city later hosted Google's Latin American research centre.
Source: Belo Horizonte
