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One of the few museums in the city really worth a visit is the Museu Historico Abilio 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 Lucia"); the most convenient stop to catch the bus is along Avenida Amazonas between Rua Espirito Santo and Rua dos Caetes. If you ask the conductor for the Museu Historico, 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. 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 Praca 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 Rodoviaria.
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