The brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, where this WHS is located, is a new city: it was founded in 1897. In its older area the eclectic and neoclassical buildings are mixed with the modern ones, some of them works of the architect Oscar Niemeyer, like the residential tower that has his name in Liberdade Square. This area (districts of Savassi, Lourdes, Boa Viagem) is where most of the hotels are concetrated, and I agree it's the best area for a tourist to stay. The Pampulha district is located a bit further, it was added to the city in the 1940's, and despite having the most famous tourist attraction of the city, that is the lake and its Niemeyer buildings, it's mostly a residential zone. It has a different atmosphere than the rest of the city: calm streets, calm traffic, and is all about the modern, but not in a monumental way, except for the two concrete stadiums, Mineirão and Mineirinho, that can be seen from the lake and are, in my opinion, disturbances in the landscape of this site.

The lake isn't small, and the four buildings inscribed in this WHS are not very close to each other. If you are in a good physical condition or have a lot of free time you can visit all four by foot, because walking on the shores of the lake is quite pleasant. I didn't have both, so I just visited two buildings, the church and the ballroom. The yacht club is located between them, but I didn't think it was open to tourist visitation (and I still don't know) so I decided to skip it. The cassino, now a museum, has the most isolated location of the four, so I had to skip it too.  

The church of Saint Francis, recently restored, is magnificent. It is very small, more like a chapel in fact, and has a beautiful interaction of architecture and art, as Niemeyer made colaborations with three brazilian artists in this building: Cândido Portinari, Paulo Werneck and Alfredo Ceschiatti. Portinari is a very important artist to the brazilian modernism, he's the most famous of the three and also the one who made more works of art for the church - the panels of painted tiles, both outside and inside, and inside the 14 paintings of Via Crucis and the painted mural behind the altar. Ceschiatti made the bronze scultures of batistery (he also made the angels suspended in Brasília cathedral) and Werneck the outside mosaics with abstract forms (he made a similar mosaic in the nearby Juscelino Kubitschek house, designed by Niemeyer but not part of the WHS). The whole thing was so innovative and shocking for the time when it was built (1943), that people rejected the church, and started using it only in the 1960's. The internal mural of Portinari was specially impressive for me: bold, with a Saint Francis undressing himself, distorted human figures like Picasso ones, and a dog.

On the other hand, the ballroom (Casa do Baile) was very disapointing. Currently the gardens are being restored, so it was a bit of bad luck, with the views of the lake in the beautiful curved marquee turned unpleasant with mounds of sand and people working. Like the church, it is a small building, with basically a round space, used now for arts expositions, and the open air area with the marquee. I think I spent five or ten minutes there. I had the feeling of a place with great potential but totally underused. The complex already has a museum, so I don't understand another art space. Ian Cade said, in his review, that the place had a stand of a brewery, but unfortunately it was gone, I don't know if just for a while, because of the restoration, or if it's gone forever.   

Overall, I had mixed impressions. As a landscape, it is remarkable with its suble buildings (so different than Brasília), but it has issues, like the stadiums and the yacht club addition, that can caught more attention than it should. I also don't like everything being turned into museums, specially in such recent buildings. I hope masses still can be celebrated at the restored church, but at least marriages I know will be allowed.