The chapel came first. Everything in this part of Minas Gerais tends to begin with a devotional dedication and a few families clustered around it, and Passos was no exception: the name is inherited whole from Senhor Bom Jesus dos Passos, the figure to whom that first chapel was consecrated. Officialdom caught up slowly. The municipality was created on 9 October 1848, formally installed on 7 September 1850, and granted city status on 14 May 1858 — ten years of paperwork between the idea and the title. That the town's saint's name happens to double as the Portuguese word for footsteps is a coincidence Passos has never stopped enjoying, and the civic motto is the proof.

Look at a topographic map and the municipality reads as a shallow bowl with two rims. Bom Descanso hill reaches 1,224 metres, Garrafão 1,125 — modest peaks by Brazilian standards, but enough to catch weather and to give the town a horizon. Below them the land does what southwestern Minas land does best: it grows things. Coffee, sugarcane, rice, beans and maize come off the surrounding farms, and the city processes what it can. Sugar and yeast plants operate here. So do dairies turning milk into byproducts and poultry operations sized for the national market. Later arrivals broadened the base into heavy-vehicle parts, cement, shoes and clothing, which is why Passos feels less like a farm town than the numbers suggest.

The Furnas Reservoir changed this corner of Minas. Damming the Rio Grande drowned valleys and left behind a shoreline so long and so blue that the region rebranded itself around it. Seventy kilometres from Passos, Capitólio calls itself the Queen of the Lakes and has built a genuine tourism economy on the Furnas Canyon — sheer stone walls dropping straight into still water, reachable only by boat, with waterfalls spilling down the rock face. Clear rivers and cascades draw weekend traffic from three states. Passos is where a good share of that traffic passes through, buys fuel, and sleeps. There is a quiet irony in it. The reservoir that made Capitólio famous was built to generate power, not scenery, and the canyon walls tourists photograph today are simply the sides of hills that used to stand above dry ground. Half a century on, nobody remembers the valleys.

Most people reach Passos on a bus. The Expresso Gardênia runs down from Belo Horizonte, Buser sells an overnight seat, and ridesharing fills the gaps for travellers willing to trade comfort for a lower fare. Those who fly land at the airport five kilometres out on highway MG-050, toward Itaú de Minas, where a 1,500-metre paved runway handles light and medium aircraft in daylight. What surprises visitors is what happens after dark. Passos has a reputation across the region for its nightlife — shows, bars, clubs that fill on weekends — helped along by the student population drawn to the Fundação de Ensino Superior de Passos. For a town whose name means steps, it turns out to be a place people stop.