A Walk Around Lagoa da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte
Pampulha is an artificial lake in the north of the city, about 18 km around. In the early 1940s the young mayor Juscelino Kubitschek, who later became President of Brazil and built Brasília, wanted to create a modern leisure district around it. He invited an architect who was still almost unknown, Oscar Niemeyer. Niemeyer designed a set of buildings along the shore, the landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx did the gardens, and the painter Cândido Portinari made the murals and tiles. In 2016 UNESCO declared the Pampulha Modern Ensemble a World Heritage Site. For many architects, this is where Brazilian modernism really began.The walkThe most famous building is the Igreja São Francisco de Assis, a small church made of curved concrete vaults, like a row of waves. The back wall is covered in blue and white tiles by Portinari showing Saint Francis with animals. When it was finished, the Catholic Church refused to consecrate it for over a decade, partly because the design was considered too strange for a church. Today it appears on postcards and is one of the symbols of the city.Further along the shore you pass the Casa do Baile, a former dance hall with a long curving canopy that follows the edge of the water. Across the lake is the old casino. It operated for only a few years before gambling was banned in Brazil in 1946. It is now the Pampulha Art Museum, with glass walls and ramps inside.How people use itOn weekday mornings the lake belongs to runners, cyclists and people walking their dogs. On weekends whole families come. You’ll see people drinking coconut water straight from the coconut, sold from carts along the path, and children looking for the capybaras that live on the shore. These are the world’s largest rodents, and they are calm enough to graze a few metres from the walkers. The Mineirão, the big football stadium where Atlético and Cruzeiro play, is also nearby, so on match days the area fills with fans in black-and-white or blue.What it means to meIt means a lot to me, above all for piece of mind andFor me, Pampulha shows something typical of Brazil: a mix of ambitious modern ideas and everyday ordinary life. It’s a world-famous piece of architecture, and it’s also just the place where people go on Sunday to drink coconut water and look at the capybaras.
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