In 1707 the Portuguese crown issued a sesmaria along the Verde Grande River to Antônio Gonçalves Figueira, and the property was known as the Montes Claros farm — bright hills. That name outlived the farm. Late in the eighteenth century, Ensign José Lopes de Carvalho built a chapel on the site, and the settlement that gathered around it followed the pattern of the Brazilian interior: church first, everything else afterward. It was formally founded on 13 October 1831 as Montes Claros de Formigas, and elevated to city status on 3 July 1857. The location was not accidental. This is sertão, the dry backland, and the town grew up on the routes that connected the São Francisco River trade to the rest of Minas Gerais — a waystation that decided to become a destination.

At roughly 655 meters above sea level, with Morro Vermelho rising to 1,075 meters nearby, Montes Claros sits in cerrado country edged with caatinga. The climate is emphatic about its two halves: rainy, hot summers and dry, mild winters, with annual rainfall around 1,000 millimeters. During the dry season the relative humidity regularly drops below 30 percent, which is desert territory, and residents keep water in bowls to take the edge off the air. Temperature records tell the same story of extremes — 5.8°C on 18 July 2000, 40.4°C on 8 October 2020. Yet this is São Francisco basin land. The Vieira, Cedro, Verde Grande, and Pacuí rivers cross the municipality, twelve lagoons dot it, and the water that is scarce in the air is abundant enough underground to have carved out something remarkable.

Twelve kilometers from the city, in the Serra da Vieira, the Lapa Grande complex runs about three kilometers into the rock — one of the largest cave systems in Minas Gerais. An underground river flows through it for more than a kilometer. The chambers hold fossilized animal remains and rare speleothems of volcanic origin. Lapa Grande is the headline, but it is not alone: the municipality has 164 catalogued archaeological sites, a density that speaks to how long people have been using these shelters. There is also Lapa Encantada, with waterfalls and its own subterranean watercourse, and the Engenho Cave. A city that presents itself as an industrial hub is, underneath, one of the more thoroughly hollowed landscapes in the state.

Industry arrived here in 1882 with the Cedro textile factory, which burned down in 1889 — a short and instructive run. Textiles came back and stayed: Coteminas operates here today, alongside a genuinely mixed industrial roster that includes Novo Nordisk in pharmaceuticals, Lafarge in cement, Nestlé in food, and a Petrobras biodiesel plant. Services and commerce, not manufacturing, now dominate the economy, which is what happens when a city becomes the place an entire region shops, studies, and goes to hospital. Three public higher-education institutions anchor that role — the State University of Montes Claros, the Federal Institute of Northern Minas Gerais, and UFMG's Institute of Agricultural Sciences. Mário Ribeiro Airport, opened on 18 December 1939, connects it to the rest of the country.

Two festivals define the local calendar. The August Festival fills the streets in the middle of the dry season. The Pequi Festival celebrates a fruit that central Brazil loves and almost nowhere else does — small, pulpy, unmistakably itself, and the subject of enough regional loyalty to justify a party. The city's green spaces carry the year in between: Parque Municipal Milton Prates with its lake and zoo, Parque Sapucaia as a forest reserve outside town, and Parque Guimarães Rosa along the Córrego Carrapato. Above it all stands the Cathedral of Our Lady of Aparecida, 65 meters tall, with the small hillside Igrejinha dos Morrinhos as its modest counterpoint. Montes Claros has produced its share of Brazil's cultural figures too — the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, born here in 1922, the novelist Cyro dos Anjos, and the musician Beto Guedes.