Baroque gold-rush towns in the Brazilian highlands, cooler and drier than the coast. Minas gerais barely has a temperature season: daytime highs move only about 4 °C across the whole year, from 22 °C in June to 26 °C in February. What changes instead is rain.
Measured against a city trip, the conditions hold up April to September. May is the most consistent single month: highs near 23 °C, nights around 14 °C, and roughly 33 mm of rain across the month.
The binding constraint here is rainfall — that is what rules months out, not any composite judgement. Rainfall is sharply seasonal: December averages 295 mm against 9 mm in June, so the wet season is the real planning constraint rather than heat or cold. January is the weakest month on these criteria.
October sit just outside the window — part of the month works and part does not. These are usually the interesting weeks: conditions are close to the peak-season answer while prices and crowds are not. The map lets you check them fortnight by fortnight rather than trusting a monthly average.
What Minas Gerais is known for
- Ouro Preto is a UNESCO World Heritage site and the finest colonial ensemble in Brazil
- Aleijadinho's soapstone prophets at Congonhas are the masterpiece of Brazilian baroque sculpture
- The 18th-century gold rush here produced a large share of the world's gold supply at the time
- Minas cuisine — pao de queijo, feijao tropeiro — is the country's most distinctive regional cooking
- Altitude keeps it mild: Belo Horizonte sits around 850 m
Month by month
| Month | High °C | Low °C | Precip mm | Wet days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 26 | 18 | 250 | 19.7 |
| February | 26 | 18 | 181 | 15.6 |
| March | 25 | 17 | 152 | 18.2 |
| April | 24 | 16 | 90 | 11.7 |
| May | 23 | 14 | 33 | 6.5 |
| June | 22 | 12 | 9 | 3.0 |
| July | 22 | 12 | 17 | 2.3 |
| August | 23 | 12 | 23 | 3.4 |
| September | 25 | 14 | 48 | 7.7 |
| October | 25 | 16 | 135 | 14.3 |
| November | 25 | 17 | 233 | 20.7 |
| December | 25 | 17 | 295 | 23.2 |
Ticked rows are months where every hard requirement for a city trip is met across at least half the month.
Open Minas Gerais on the map →
Nearby regions
Figures are 30-year climatology sampled at Belo Horizonte, Ouro Preto, Tiradentes, Mariana and Diamantina, averaged across those locations, from ERA5-Land reanalysis fitted with a harmonic seasonal cycle and a trend term, evaluated for 2026. Sampling named towns rather than averaging the whole region avoids blending valley and mountain conditions into a figure true of neither. Cells are about 0.08° wide, from ERA5-Land's 0.1° grid, which is itself driven by a 0.25° (~28 km) atmospheric reanalysis — so individual valleys, sheltered bays and single summits are not resolved. In steep terrain read these as conditions for the wider area rather than for one village. They describe typical conditions, not a forecast. Read how the climatology is built.