The first settlement was established in 1778 during the late-colonial push into the Minas Gerais highlands that followed the gold rush. The original name, Dores do Pantano - "Sorrows of the Marsh" - captured something of the character of this corner of Brazil in its earliest days: wet, difficult, somewhat inhospitable. By 1804, it still bore that name. Work began on the parish church in 1814, and at roughly the same time the first coffee plantations appeared. Coffee changed everything. The volcanic soils and mild highland climate turned this corner of Minas Gerais into productive coffee country, and the parish attached to the little church grew into something more. In 1866, provincial law elevated the parish to the status of village. On November 15, 1868, Provincial Law No. 1611 promoted it to municipality, with its own seat of local government. By then, the name had changed too - from the sorrowful marsh to the mountain of good hope.

In 1957 and 1958, construction began on the Furnas Dam - one of the largest hydroelectric projects in Brazilian history, part of a national push to electrify the country and power its industrial expansion. The dam impounded the Rio Grande, creating Furnas Lake, which at its full extent covers more than 1,400 square kilometers and touches dozens of municipalities. Boa Esperanca sat on its edge. The town had been agricultural and a little sleepy, known regionally for coffee and not much else. The lake transformed it. Tourism became a pillar of the economy, drawing visitors from Belo Horizonte and beyond for fishing, water sports, lakeside hotels. The royalties paid by Furnas Centrais Eletricas to the municipalities around the lake have provided a steady fiscal base for local government ever since. A town that started in a marsh became a lake town - first by naming itself for the mountain above, then by the engineering that flooded the valley below.

Boa Esperanca sits at 775 meters elevation in a zone that is technically tropical but tempered by altitude - annual average temperature of 19 degrees Celsius, about 1,500 mm of rain a year, summers hot and winters cool. Coffee remains the primary agricultural product, consumed domestically and exported abroad. Grain, rice, garlic, potatoes, beans, maize, sugarcane, cassava, soybeans, tomatoes, and various fruits fill out the farming economy. Cattle, pigs, and poultry have been raised here since the earliest settlement. The Rio Grande and its tributaries - the Ribeirao Sao Pedro, Ribeirao das Tres Pontas, Ribeirao Marimbondo, Ribeirao da Maricota - web through the municipality. Birdlife is abundant: darters, herons, lapwings, kingfishers, jabirus. Capybaras live in the wetlands, brocket deer in the forest margins, monkeys in the remaining araucaria groves. The vegetation is a mix of cerrado, gallery forest, and the distinctive araucaria highlands that mark southern Minas.

Lamartine Babo - the Carioca composer also known for "Carnaval no Fogo" and "Voce" - wrote "Serra da Boa Esperanca" in the mid-1930s, and it became one of the defining songs of Brazilian popular music. Dorival Caymmi sang it. So did Francisco Alves and dozens of others. The song is simple: it evokes the hills, the moonlight, the longing of distance. For a municipality of just over 40,000 people, having a national song of that caliber carry its name is a minor miracle and a persistent source of local pride. Every tourism brochure mentions it. The serra itself rises above the town, visible from the lake and from the approach highways, and it is hard to look at the range without the melody coming somewhere to mind if you have ever heard it. The song outlasted its moment. It became part of the landscape.