Campus and city
UFMG's main campus is in the leafy Pampulha district of Belo Horizonte — a spacious, green, modernist-influenced setting near the city's famous Pampulha lake and Niemeyer architecture — with additional campuses in Montes Claros and Tiradentes. Belo Horizonte is a large, friendly and affordable Brazilian city known for its food, bars and live-music culture, giving students an authentic and low-cost experience. The community is large (around 50,000 students plus thousands of staff) and overwhelmingly Brazilian; international enrollment is only a few hundred students, so campus life and instruction run almost entirely in Portuguese. For Portuguese-speaking students it offers a vibrant, research-rich and good-value university experience, with the bonus of proximity to the San Pedro Valley startup ecosystem for those in tech.