Qualla: Ipanema Park

Ipanema Park: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HVL, Public domain. Ipatinga is a city built around steel. Usiminas - one of Brazil's largest steel manufacturers - shaped the town's population, its economy, and its skyline. In the 1970s, the company and the city administration looked at a strip of undeveloped land along the Ipanema stream and decided it should be a park instead of another industrial site. They hired Roberto Burle Marx - the landscape architect whose sinuous black-and-white waves paved Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana - to design it. The result took nearly twenty years to finish and now covers roughly one square kilometer of green space inside the city, making it one of the largest urban parks in Minas Gerais.

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Image: HVL | Public domain

Ipanema Park: The Last Burle Marx

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HVL, CC BY 4.0. Roberto Burle Marx was 76 years old when he took on the Ipanema Park commission in 1985. He had already designed the landscape architecture that defined modern Brazil - the Flamengo Park in Rio, the Itamaraty Palace gardens in Brasília, Copacabana's wave-patterned promenade. Ipat...

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Image: HVL | CC BY 4.0

Ipanema Park: Twelve Thousand Trees

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HVL, CC BY 4.0. By 2013, city surveys counted approximately 12,000 trees planted across the park's one million square meters, representing about 60 species. Pink trumpet trees - *Handroanthus heptaphyllus*, known in Portuguese as *ipê rosa* - line some of the walking paths and turn whole section...

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Image: HVL | CC BY 4.0

Ipanema Park: A Fittipaldi Connection

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HVL, CC BY 3.0. Inside the park sits the Emerson Fittipaldi International Karting Track - 1,200 meters of circuit named after the Brazilian Formula One champion. In 1985, a round of the Brazilian Karting Championship drew 40,000 spectators to the stands and the surrounding grass. In 2004 the tra...

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Image: HVL | CC BY 3.0

Ipanema Park: The Calendar

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HVL, CC BY 4.0. The park is not just designed landscape; it is municipal living room. On 29 April, Ipatinga's birthday, the anniversary festivities fill the grounds - in 2019, as part of the city's 55th-anniversary celebrations, a five-and-a-half-meter steel "Eu Amo Ipatinga" sign (a gift from U...

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Image: HVL | CC BY 4.0

Ipanema Park: What the Park Is and Isn't

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HVL, CC BY 3.0. Ipanema Park was declared a municipal cultural heritage site in 2000, protecting Burle Marx's design and the mature tree cover from future development. It is maintained by the Ipatinga City Hall, which has real work to do: graffiti, damaged and occasionally burned garbage cans, b...

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Image: HVL | CC BY 3.0