Minas Gerais

Minas Gerais

With 2.4 million inhabitants Belo Horizonte is the capital of the state of Minas Gerais. Planned from scratch at the end of the 19th century, rapid and accelerating growth soon put an end to planning concerns. Today the city´s rampant sprawl obeys its own set of rules. The State of Minas Gerais is the size of France and has over 20 million inhabitants. This region is one of the greenest, most fertile and most prosperous parts of Brazil. The gross national product in 2009 was $9,000 per capita (Germany $45,000).
100 km north of Belo Horizonte, founded in 1984, is the 33,800 acre Serra do Cipó National Park. Since 1990 the park has been surrounded by a 66,200-hectar-wide belt called "APA Morro da Pedra" that acts as an additional protection zone.