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Belo Horizonte, City of Bars

Belo Horizonte Night...

The New York Times gets it right about Belo's bar scene!

A Town Where All the World Is a Bar
Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times

BELO HORIZONTE, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, has managed to become the country’s third-largest city while remaining almost completely unknown to the outside world. If tourists more drawn to the sybaritic pleasures of Rio de Janeiro or the urban clamor of São Paulo know it at all, it is because they may pass through it on their way to Ouro Preto and Diamantina, treating it as a little more than a refueling stop as they head toward those picturesque colonial-era mining towns.

Its international anonymity was born of no coastline and thus no beaches, no famous Carnival and thus no February madness, and no big attractions save a few buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer that pale next to his famous works in Brasília.

But Beagá, the city’s nickname (from the pronunciation of its initials in Portuguese), does have a claim to fame: as the bar capital of Brazil. Not bars as in slick hotel lounges or boozy meat markets, but bars as in botecos, informal sit-down spots where multiple generations socialize, drink beer and often have an informal meal. If you believe the local bluster, there are 12,000 bars in the city, more per capita than anywhere else in the country. Why, no one is completely sure, but one theory has turned into a popular saying: "Não tem mares, tem bares." Loosely: "There are no seas, thus there are bars."

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