The design came from Manuel Francisco Lisboa, the Portuguese architect whose son Antonio - known as Aleijadinho - would become the most famous artist of colonial Brazil. Lisboa laid out a curving facade and twin bell towers, the work fitted to the sloping streets of Vila Rica. Construction began in 1756 under master builder Jose Pereira dos Santos. Almost immediately, the Saint Quiteria Brotherhood, which had donated the land, began raising objections. They pushed back on boundaries, on encroachments, on the way the new building crowded their old chapel. Eleven years later, in 1767, the ground was still not properly prepared. The foundations were just being laid.

A new builder, Joao Alves Viana, was brought in to push the project through. He did what colonial masons often did - started with the main chapel and worked outward, so that services could begin at one end before the other was finished. Between 1767 and 1769 Viana completed the main chapel and the stonework around doors and windows. The chapel of Saint Quiteria, which had sheltered Carmelite devotions for a generation, was probably demolished in 1771. The carpentry was done the same year. The nave took until 1779. By 1780 Francisco de Lima Cerqueira had finished the stone doorway, the choir arch, and the sacristy washroom. Three decades after the project started, the Carmelites finally had their church.

The original plan was Manuel Francisco Lisboa's final design - his last commission before his death. But the layout changed several times during those long construction delays, and historians have long speculated that his son Aleijadinho contributed to the revisions. The evidence is stylistic: the curving facade, the almost circular upper stages of the bell towers, the Rococo lightness that softens what was originally a heavier Baroque conception. Aleijadinho's hand was everywhere in late colonial Minas Gerais, and the Carmo Church bears his signature even if no document confirms it. The father designed the structure. The son may have given it its curves.

Stand in front and the facade reveals itself slowly. The gentle curvature - a feature rarely seen in Brazilian churches of the period - gives the building a sense of motion, as though the stone were breathing. A large central doorway wears a carved frontispiece like a crown. The twin bell towers begin as square bases and transform, in their upper sections, into almost perfect circles topped by bell-shaped corbels and pinnacles that needle the sky. The side walls carry arched windows in regular rows, but above them the oculus openings play a visual game: four oculus for five windows, an intentional mismatch that keeps the eye moving. Nothing here is quite symmetrical. Nothing here is meant to be.

The Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is protected by IPHAN, Brazil's national heritage institute, and sits at the center of Ouro Preto's UNESCO-listed historic core. The gold that built it has been gone for two centuries - Vila Rica's mines played out and the boomtown shrank to a ghost-lovely hill town of cobbled streets. What remains is the architecture: over a dozen churches in a few square kilometers, each commissioned by a different brotherhood, each an argument in stone about faith and status and beauty. The Carmo is one of the finest. It took almost thirty years to build because two brotherhoods could not stop arguing, and in the end that long fight produced one of the most graceful buildings in the country.