In the early 20th century, a Russian-born educator named Helena Antipoff arrived in Minas Gerais with a set of pedagogical ideas that did not fit neatly into any Brazilian institutional slot. Antipoff had trained in Geneva under Édouard Claparède, absorbed the educational psychology of early 20th-century Europe, and then looked for a place to apply it. She chose what is now Ibirité. The Antipoff Foundation and the school complex she built there became one of the defining features of the municipality, experimenting with special education, teacher training, and rural schooling approaches that influenced Brazilian education nationally. When Ibirité became a municipality in 1962, the Antipoff legacy was already the town's main cultural reference. The meteorological station that operates there today is housed, pointedly, at the Helena Antipoff Foundation. Her name is still the one the city returns to when asked what sets it apart.

Ibirité achieved municipal status relatively late. Before 1962 it was successively a district of Sabará (until 1897), then Santa Quitéria which is now Esmeraldas (1897-1911), then Betim (1911-1962). Each of those jurisdictions drew boundaries differently; each moved administrative offices somewhere else; each changed what Ibirité meant legally. The final separation from Betim happened on December 30, 1962, with the new municipality containing the Sede (seat) and Sarzedo districts. Wanderlei José de Barros was elected the first mayor in June 1963. In 1976 the Durval de Barros district was added; in 1985, the Mario Campos district. These administrative milestones look dry on paper, but for residents they determined everything about which taxes paid for which schools and which police. The iron land had belonged to many governments before it belonged to itself.

Petrobras, Brazil's state oil company, built the Gabriel Passos refinery on land that straddles the Ibirité-Betim municipal boundary, with more than half of the footprint on Ibirité's side. The refinery processes crude oil into fuels, petrochemicals, and other refined products, supplying much of southeastern Minas Gerais. In 2002 Petrobras inaugurated Ibiritermo, a natural-gas-fired thermoelectric plant built to stabilize the state's electricity supply during Brazil's energy crisis of the early 2000s. These two industrial complexes dominate Ibirité's economic geography. They do not, however, dominate Ibirité's employment. Most residents commute out of the city to work in Belo Horizonte, Contagem, or Betim — a pattern that led local observers to call Ibirité a cidade dormitório, a dormitory city. The refinery's jobs exist, but they do not fill the town.

On Ibirité's western edge spreads part of the Serra do Rola-Moça State Park, 3,941 hectares of Atlantic Forest hillside created in 1994 and shared with the municipalities of Belo Horizonte, Brumadinho, Ibirité, and Nova Lima. The park's name translates roughly as the Ridge of the Rolling Girl, a reference to a dark local legend about a young woman who died falling from the ridge. The park protects one of the last significant patches of Atlantic Forest in the Belo Horizonte metropolitan region, along with important headwater springs that supply water to millions of people. Within the park, hikers can reach the Mirante da Estrada Velha viewpoint and several waterfalls that cascade down from the ridgeline. For residents of the Belo Horizonte metro area, the park is one of the closest places where the air is cooler, the trees are taller, and the city is genuinely out of sight.

The Ibirité meteorological station, housed at the Antipoff Foundation at 816 meters above sea level, records a mild Minas Gerais highland climate with dense vegetation nearby softening the temperature extremes. The Casa Branca district, about 20 kilometers from the city center, hides a cluster of small waterfalls that most Belo Horizonte residents have never visited but that local families treat as weekend destinations. Agriculture still matters modestly: in 2003 the IBGE recorded 3,691 tons of tomatoes from Ibirité, along with smaller harvests of onions, corn, cassava, and sugarcane. The cattle herd is small — 1,225 head in 2003. The municipality holds the contradictions characteristic of metropolitan Brazilian life: industrial infrastructure at scale, a commuting population that works elsewhere, agricultural remnants in the outer districts, and a state park preserving something of the landscape that existed before any of it.