Brazil is one of the few countries to have invented its own form of writing on walls. Pixação — the angular, vertical, deliberately illegible tagging that climbs the sides of São Paulo tower blocks — came out of the 1980s and owes nothing to New York. It is not decoration and was never meant to be liked. It is also the root system that the country's celebrated muralism grew out of.

That muralism is now everywhere, and it is unusually colourful, unusually large and unusually well tolerated: São Paulo painted over its walls under one mayor and repainted them under the next. Belo Horizonte, the planned mountain capital of Minas Gerais, has its own scene, shaped by a city built all at once in the 1890s and by the modernist architecture at Pampulha that came half a century later.

Minas is worth understanding on its own terms. It is the mining state — gold, then iron — and its baroque towns, Ouro Preto above all, hold the country's richest colonial art. The distance between that and the walls of Belo Horizonte is smaller than it looks; both are the work of a state that has always exported more artists than it kept.

Distances are continental. Flying between regions is normal, and the cities themselves are best covered by metro where one exists.