While visiting Fabiola's family in Brazil, we took a side trip to the town we tell everyone about: Ouro Preto, a UNESCO World Heritage city in the hills of Minas Gerais. It was foggy, it rained on and off all day, the streets go up at angles that should require climbing gear, and we'd still put it first on a Brazil itinerary. The old gold-rush capital is baroque churches, cobblestone alleys, and mining history stacked on a hillside, and the low clouds pouring through the valley between showers only made it look better.
Watch the full video on YouTube.
Checking in for the view
We picked our room for one reason: the window. Ouro Preto is built into a bowl of hills with church towers on every ridge, so a room with a view turns the weather into entertainment. We watched whole neighborhoods disappear into fog and come back while we unpacked.
Lunch: feijão tropeiro at Bené da Flauta
For lunch we went traditional at Bené da Flauta, an institution near the São Francisco de Assis church, and ordered feijão tropeiro: beans with farofa, bacon, egg, and collard greens, with torresmo (pork cracklings) on top, because in Minas Gerais the torresmo is not optional. It's the dish that fueled the mule drivers who supplied these mining towns, and it will fuel a full afternoon of hills. Nathan is still thinking about it.
The soapstone market
Ouro Preto is famous for pedra-sabão, the local soapstone, and the market stalls are full of hand-carved pots, bowls, and figures. We spent a while admiring pieces and running our usual full-timer calculation: which of these would survive life in a moving house? The answer is fewer than we'd like. Soapstone cookware is genuinely great (it holds heat like cast iron), but it's heavy and it chips, so we mostly admired and moved on.
Into the gold mine
The highlight was a guided visit to one of the old mines that honeycomb these hills, Minas do Palácio Velho. Helmets on, heads down, into tunnels cut by hand centuries ago. The guide walked us through how the air shafts ventilated the workings, how the ore was extracted, and the sobering human history underneath all that baroque gold above ground: this wealth was dug by enslaved people in exactly these tunnels. It reframes every gilded church in town. Modern prospecting is prohibited now, partly because the hills are so riddled with old shafts that new digging risks collapsing the town on top of them.
The climb to the palace in the clouds
We finished with a calf-burning climb to Palácio D'Ouro, a hilltop palace and viewpoint, where we learned two things on arrival. First, visiting is a guided tour of an hour and a half to two hours, which we hadn't budgeted. Second, the famous overlook was completely inside a cloud. We stood at a viewpoint known for its panorama and admired a wall of white. Classic Ouro Preto: it gives you the view when it feels like it, and somehow the town is dramatic enough that you don't feel cheated.
If you're building a Brazil trip around beaches and big cities, carve out two days for this place. Bring shoes with grip, expect rain, and plan around Portuguese-only tours. It's the best city we've visited in Brazil, and we say that as a household where one of us is Brazilian and biased toward everywhere else.
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