Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
EATING AND DRINKING
314 Sabarabuçu
Rua Dom Pedro II 279
T
31 3671
2313.
This pizza place on Praça Santa Rita is one of the
oldest in town and offers R$9.90 specials - the pizzas are
pretty good, but they also do reliable barbecue; it's famous
for its local chicken
com ora-pro-nobis
(literally, “pray for
us”, a local herb). The decor here represents the local
mining culture.
Mon-Sat 11.30am-2.30pm & 6-10pm.
Santíssimo Bar
Praça Melo Viana 34
T
31 3671 2147.
By far the coolest place for a drink in town, on a terrace
overlooking Praça Melo Viana, though its main focus is
creating (yet more) innovative pizza toppings
. Tues-Sun
6pm-3am.
2
Ouro Preto
The most enchanting of all the colonial towns in Minas Gerais,
OURO PRETO
lies
100km southeast of Belo Horizonte, its narrow, cobbled streets straddling impossibly
steep hills topped with Baroque churches and lined with an assortment of candy-
coloured eighteenth-century homes and mansions. Unsurprisingly, the town is also
the most visited in the region, but it's far from becoming a giant museum; touristy
shops and restaurants dominate the centre, but this remains a working town with a
population of over 70,000 - get up early on a weekday and you'll see locals drinking
coffee on the way to work, smell smoke from wood fires and hear church bells ringing
for the faithful. Other than just soaking up the historic ambience, art and architecture
are the main attractions here (it was capital of the state until 1897), though Ouro Preto
is also a tempting place to load up on the precious stones - notably
tourmaline
and
imperial topaz
- and jewellery Minas Gerais is known for.
Brief history
Less than a decade after gold was struck at Sabará, a
paulista
adventurer called
Antônio
Dias
pitched camp underneath a mountain the indigenous peoples called
Itacolomi
,
with an unmistakeable thumb-shaped rock on its summit (it's still there). Panning the
streams nearby, he found “black gold” - alluvial gold mixed with iron ore - and named
his camp after it (
ouro preto
). It attracted a flood of people as it became clear that the
deposits were the richest yet found in Minas, and so many came that they outstripped
the food supply. In 1700 there was a famine and legend has it that people died of
hunger with gold nuggets in their hands.
The early years were hard, made worse by a war started in 1707 between the
Portuguese and
paulista bandeirantes
, who resisted the Crown's attempts to take over
the area. he war, the
Guerra das Emboabas
, lasted for two years and was brutal, with
ambushes and massacres the preferred tactics of both sides. Ouro Preto was the
Portuguese base, and troops from here drove the
paulistas
from their headquarters at
Sabará and finally annihilated them near São João del Rei. From then on, Ouro Preto
was the effective
capital
of the gold-producing area of Minas, although it wasn't
o
cially named as such until 1823. Indeed, compared to places like nearby Mariana,
Ouro Preto was a late developer; all but two of its churches date from the second half
of the eighteenth century.
The gold gave out about the time Brazil finally became independent in 1822, but for
decades the town survived as an administrative centre and university town; a
school of
mining
- now a federal university - was founded in 1876. After the capital moved to
Belo Horizonte, steady decline set in, though the populist government of Getúlio
FESTIVE OURO PRETO
Ouro Preto has an extremely popular street
Carnaval
that attracts visitors from far afield, so be
sure to reserve accommodation far in advance. Likewise, at
Easter
, the town becomes the
focus of a spectacular series of plays and processions lasting for about a month before Easter
Sunday; the last days of the life of Christ are played out in open-air theatres throughout town.
