NOMADMANIA
CONFERENCE #6
Ouro Preto, Brazil 🇧🇷

If you’re coming long-haul, you can arrive into Belo Horizonte a day early to shake off jet lag and overnight in BH on your own. 

For those doing so, we’ll organize an optional visit to Inhotim Art Museum on the following day, Day 1 (June 10), before transferring to Ouro Preto. We highly suggest a visit to this amazing World Class Museum and Botanical Gardens, situated just outside B.H.

Transfer from BH to Inhotim and then to Ouro Preto will be provided for a small additional cost.

This is a soft landing designed to get everyone comfortably to base. Rolling shuttles take participants from CNF airport in Belo Horizonte to Ouro Preto, with check-in and time to breathe after long-haul flights.

In the evening we share a simple Mineira dinner and a short briefing that covers the essentials: how we will move as a group in a hilly colonial town, what to expect in churches and the mines, and how the UN+ theme threads through the next four days.

By the end of the night, people know the plan and have a sense of place without being overwhelmed.

We begin the morning inside the Casa da Ópera, a venue that is a lesson in itself: eighteenth-century proportions, stagecraft, and acoustics that have worked continuously for centuries. It is widely considered the oldest functioning theatre in the Americas, and it will serve as our base for two conference sessions.

We break for a Mineira lunch and leave for a full afternoon city walking tour at the heart of Ouro Preto.

The afternoon starts with a short orientation walk from Praça Tiradentes main square, then step inside the Matriz de Nossa Senhora do Pilar, a clear, didactic way to explain gold wealth through gilded woodwork and liturgical objects.

At the Museu da Inconfidência we connect ideas of liberty and identity to real people and documents, then balance the narrative at the Casa dos Contos, where minting, taxation, and the realities of slavery are addressed directly. 

The evening is our first Gala Dinner: not formal in attire, but important in tone— recognitions, a few short speeches, and a steady Mineira menu.

Day 3 flips the lens from art to extraction and science.

We start with Conference Session 2 on our hotel to talk about UN+ and other related topics. 
We head to the city for lunch and then split the group for our second day of sightseeing.

The day will be finished in the charming Mariana – the oldest oldest town in the entire region. 

We begin with an early departure towards Congonhas to see Aleijadinho’s Prophets and the chapels of the Passion — an accessible way to read Minas’s baroque sculpture outdoors, at human scale. This is a World Heritage Site.

Then we return to Ouro Preto for our last plenary session in Casa da Opera.

Our last dinner will take places in the iconic Grande Hotel of Ouro Preto which is also an item on NomadMania’s Hospitality Legends list and offers a spectacular view of the city.

After breakfast we make the journey to Belo Horizonte’s for a stop at Pampulha lake architectural ensemble (UNESCO) to acknowledge Minas’s modernist thread — Niemeyer, Portinari, and Burle Marx — as a clean counterpoint to the baroque we explored all week.

Then we go for our last group lunch in a local churrascaria with unlimited varieties of meat serving. Gradually people will be leaving to the airport or continue onward with their journey around Brazil. Transfers are provided.