Gorgeous museum. With history and art of Minas Gerais state. It is housed in a historical government building with beautiful architecture that has been preserved, with added modern touches. You can see everything in a couple of hours and make sure to grab a coffee at their café. The admission is free. read more

Possibly my favorite museum in Brazil! Belo Horizonte has lots of museums to choose from, but this is truly unique. They have displays on poets with small strips of poetry tucked into branches on a tree to be read. They have an exhibit on Sebastião Salgado, our favorite Brazilian photographer with videos and beautiful prints of his work. They have a section on the haunted house and history of Belo Horizonte. They showed some old time farmer movies displayed in a room decorated in farm furniture. They have a room modeled after a theater and the history of opera culture. We also looked at a historical retelling from 3 different time periods and perspectives, an Amazon indigenous, a slave and a Portuguese. They projected a video on a face cast and it looked 3-dimensional, along with a film that accompanied it. All of these were varied and unique methods of celebrating history in a captivating way. The museum is free with storage lockers for big bags, has clean restrooms, an open air courtyard and a bright cafe in the back. All information has both English and Portuguese handouts which made it easy to follow. read more

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What a great place! This was the first place I visited as part of Belo Horizonte's cultural circuit, the Circuito Liberdade, and was without a doubt the best of all the stops I visited over two days. The building is absolutely beautiful, with a fancy staircase that greets you when you enter and an open air garden area in the center. If you need a break from checking out the exhibits, there is a cafe in the back where you can grab some coffee or snacks. Like the majority of the Circuito, entry is free and there is plenty of space to store your bags in lockers. The bottom floor had several exhibits on Brazilian artists and my favorite was definitely the Sebastião Salgado section. Having seen the film The Salt of the Earth, I was familiar with some of his work, but the exhibit here provided a lot of new information. There was also an interactive section where you could select different periods of his life and watch a 5-15 minute video highlighting pictures from the selected period. The next two floors provide an excellent history of Minas Gerais and Brazil as a whole. Using movies, interactive displays, and signs/handouts in Portuguese and English, there is plenty to learn about Brazilian culture, music, film, and plenty more. I don't know how often the exhibits rotate or if they are all permanent, but I would come again either way. read more