The Caiapó and Bororo peoples lived across this stretch of cerrado long before Europeans reached it in the 1630s, and the settlement that eventually became the city spent its first decades as a district of Uberaba. It broke away in 1888 under the name São Pedro de Uberabinha — little Uberaba, which tells you the pecking order at the time. The renaming came by state law on 19 October 1929, and the new name dropped the diminutive entirely. Growth followed the roads. Everything that has happened to Uberlândia since has been a consequence of where it sits: on the flattest, most drivable ground between São Paulo, Brasília and the agricultural interior, at a moment when Brazil was about to start moving an enormous amount of food by truck.

Five federal highways meet here. The BR-050 runs south to Uberaba and São Paulo and north to Araguari, Catalão and Brasília; the BR-365 heads for Ituiutaba, Patos de Minas and Montes Claros; the BR-452, BR-497 and BR-455 fan out toward Belo Horizonte, Araxá, Itumbiara and the western frontier. The city has turned that geometry into an identity, calling itself the Logistics Capital and the Gateway to the Cerrado, and the distribution centres lining the ring roads are the proof. Its airport, Tenente Coronel Aviador César Bombonato, is the second busiest in Minas Gerais by passenger traffic and the main commercial and business field for the whole Triângulo. Uberlândia's economy is 27th in Brazil by GDP, driven by services and distribution rather than by any one factory.

The Municipal Market was established in 1923, but the building took a while: construction only started in 1944, under Mayor Vasconcelos Costa, in the clean modern lines of the period. For three decades it was the city's wholesale heart, until the trade moved out to the Ceasa in 1977 and the market settled into its second life. It now sells the produce of Minas — cheeses, doce de leite, cachaça, cured pork, sacks of coffee — on Olegário Maciel. A few blocks away on Clarimundo Carneiro Square stands the Municipal Museum, housed in what used to be City Hall, restored and given over to exhibitions and cultural programming. In a city this new, a 1920s market and a repurposed town hall count as deep history.

Parque do Sabiá, in the eastern borough of Tibery, is Uberlândia's green centre of gravity: a zoo, seven linked lakes that merge into a single lagoon, an aquarium of 36 tanks holding 36 species, and a running track of 5,100 metres, all run by the municipal foundation FUTEL. It is loud on Sunday mornings. The quieter counterpart is Parque Municipal Victória Siquierolli in the north zone, 232,300 square metres of genuine cerrado left standing inside the city — leathery leaves, twisted trunks, fire-adapted trees that flower and fruit on their own schedule — with a biodiversity museum attached. The cerrado is one of the most threatened biomes in South America, and this is a rare chance to see the real thing without leaving an urban bus route.

Avenida Rondon Pacheco cuts the city clean from east to west, from Tubalina out to the BR-050, and somewhere along that line it becomes the reason people go out. More than sixty establishments crowd the corridor: bars, cachaçarias, pizzerias, ice cream parlours, sweet shops and restaurants, mixed in with hotels and hypermarkets. Uberlandenses call it the gastronomic corridor, and the Federal University of Uberlândia, with around 50,000 students spread across several campuses, ensures it stays full. The city sits at 863 metres, which softens the tropical heat, and its year splits hard in two — around 1,600 millimetres of rain crammed into the summer, then a winter dry enough to crack your lips. The bars are busiest when it is dry.