Inhotim

Inhotim, in the hills of Minas Gerais outside the small town of Brumadinho, is one of the most unusual art museums anywhere: not a building with a garden attached, but a landscape in which contemporary art is scattered across lakes, forest and tropical planting, so that reaching each work is part of seeing it. It was founded by the collector Bernardo Paz, who made his fortune in mining, and began as the setting for his private collection in the early 2000s; it opened to the public in 2006. Today it holds more than 500 works by Brazilian and international artists, many of them in pavilions built for a single artist or even a single piece.

That one-artist, one-building principle is what makes a visit so memorable. Doug Aitken's Sonic Pavilion (2009) is a circular glass room, empty except for the sound of the earth itself, picked up by microphones placed deep underground. Chris Burden's Beam Drop (1984–2008) is a thicket of steel beams dropped from a crane some 45 metres up into wet concrete, frozen where they fell. Matthew Barney's De Lama Lâmina has a pavilion of its own in the woods, and there are dedicated spaces for Cildo Meireles, Hélio Oiticica, Yayoi Kusama and Anish Kapoor among many others — works that could never be shown in a conventional white-walled gallery because they need their own weather, light and distance.

The setting is a work in itself. The gardens were shaped with the influence of the great Brazilian landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx, and the botanical collection runs to around 5,000 plant species, including roughly 1,300 kinds of palm — one of the largest palm collections anywhere. Sculptures appear at the end of forest paths, and the titan arum, a giant flower that blooms only rarely and famously smells of carrion, is grown here. Between pavilions the walks run through the native forest of the surrounding hills, so a day at Inhotim feels as much like a journey through a park as a museum visit.

Getting there

Inhotim lies about 3 km from the centre of Brumadinho and roughly 60 km from Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais. The nearest airport is Belo Horizonte's Tancredo Neves International Airport (CNF), in Confins, about 60 km away. The usual route is by road from Belo Horizonte; the institute has its own parking and an internal transport service between the more distant pavilions. The grounds are large, and a full day is not too much.