Belo Horizonte: Niemeyer on Lake Pampulha

Brazil's first planned city, Belo Horizonte hosted in the nineteen forties the first large architectural complex designed by Oscar Niemeyer, decades before Brasília.

The Pampulha complex requires a car or bus from the city center.

The Church of Saint Francis of Assisi at Pampulha, with its undulating cement cupolas clad in tiles painted by Cândido Portinari, was initially rejected by the local clergy for its language too modern.

The Pampulha Art Museum, a former casino closed after the gambling ban of 1946, preserves intact the curved forms designed by Niemeyer around the artificial lake created for the same complex.

The Central Market, in the city center, brings together more than four hundred shops on multiple floors selling cheeses, spices, cachaça and artisanry from Minas Gerais state.

The Praça da Liberdade, former seat of state government, today houses a dozen museums and cultural centers housed in the antique public buildings that surround it.

The church rejected by the local church is now a UNESCO heritage site: few religious buildings tell so clearly how much aesthetic judgment can change within just a few generations.

Praça da Liberdade, born as a seat of power, shows today the same willingness to reinvent itself that Lake Pampulha had already demonstrated decades before.