| One
of the few museums in the city really worth a visit is the Museu Histórico
Abílio Barreto (Mon–Fri 8am–6pm) at Rua Bernardo Mascarenhas in
Cidade Jardim. To get there, you need to take the #5901 bus (marked
“Nova Floresta/Santa Lúcia”); the most convenient stop to catch the
bus is along Avenida Amazonas between Rua Espírito Santo and Rua dos Caetés.
If you ask the conductor for the Museu Histórico, you’ll be dropped on
Contorno, a block away, from where there are signs to the museum on Rua
Bernardo Mascarenhas. The surrounding area of Cidade Jardim is rapidly
becoming one of the most fashionable, upper-class parts of the city, with
new skyscrapers sprouting like weeds. It’s an ironic location for the
oldest building in the city, the only one that predates 1893 when
construction of the new capital began. |
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| The
museum was once a fazenda, built in 1883, comfortable but not
luxurious, and typical of the ranches of rural Minas. Though now swamped
by the burgeoning city, it once stood on its own, a few kilometres away
from the church and hovels of the hamlet of Curral del Rey, which
straggled along what is now the stretch of Avenida Afonso Pena opposite
the Parque Municipal. The fazenda has been perfectly preserved and
now houses the usual collection of old furniture and mediocre paintings,
upstairs, and in the garden an old tram and turn-of-the-century train used
in the construction of Belo Horizonte. Far better is the rustic wooden
veranda at the front, where you can sit with your feet up and imagine
yourself back in the 1880s.
By far the most interesting part of the museum is
the galeria de fotografias, juxtaposing the sleepy village before
it was obliterated – mules, mud huts and ox carts – with views of the
modern city through the decades; there are a couple of well-designed maps
to help you get your bearings. The last remnant of Curral del Rey, the
eighteenth-century Igreja Matriz, was flattened in 1932: these
photographs, and carved bits of the church piled in a shed in the garden,
are all that remains of the vanished community.
Equally remarkable is the series of photographs
that record the building of Belo Horizonte and its early years: a trashed
building site becomes the Parque Municipal; the train station stands in
glorious isolation (it’s now dwarfed by the surrounding buildings); and
the Praça Sete is shown as it was in the 1930s, ringed by trees and fine
Art Deco buildings, of which only the Cine Brasil (now the Brasil
Palace Hotel) is still standing. Like Rio, urban architecture in Belo
Horizonte was at its peak in the 1930s and 1940s, when the city was an
elegant political capital, rather than an economic centre, and it has
suffered since at the hands of the developers. A classic demonstration of
this is the wonderful Art Deco market building, the Feira de Amostras
Permanentes, which you can now only appreciate here in the museum. It was
demolished in 1970 and replaced by the Rodoviária. |