Adrena Sport Hostel is definitely a place for those who enjoy an active lifestyle. Kaja and Michael, HI Norway’s exchange participants in Brazil, got to experience this when visiting this sporty hostel in Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state Mina Gerais in southeast of Brazil.

 

The ideal location for… everything!

We were being welcomed in a new language for every step we took while climbing the stairs to Adrena Sport Hostel. This is an ideal place for the active ones to enjoy and explore what the city has to offer, which is a lot. Based at the hostel, we had the opportunity to participate in a wide range of excursions. Our first weekend we even took part in a climbing festival in the world famous rock climbing site Serra do Cipó. The hostel’s very friendly and including staff continuously invited us and the other guests on activities in and around the city.

Belo Horizonte is one of the largest cities in Brazil and has a lot of traffic. However all parts of the city are easily accessed by foot. Praça Diogo de Vasconcelos, located just two blocks from the hostel, is also closed for traffic every Sunday. Then, people can go rollerblading, cycling and skateboarding or just sit and enjoy the city at one of the surrounding cafés without the hectic big city traffic.

 

A place for beer, food and coffee lovers

In ”The Capital of Bars” which is the unofficial title of Belo Horizonte, the night-life is bubbling almost every night, with many places offering live music and locally brewed beer, and many of the very best places are to be found in Adrena Sport Hostel’s district of Savassi.

Every Thursday the guests are invited to join Feirinha Da Savassi, which is a night food and beer market two blocks away from the hostel. Here, we got to explore the joyful nightlife of the lively Minas (a slang word for the locals) while enjoying delicious food from all regions of Brazil as well as live music.

There are plenty of local microbreweries offering high class, delicious beers. And if you like coffee, make sure to ask the hostel managers to take you along to their world class barista friend at Studio Café das Amoras. In this studio you can learn a lot about coffee and taste various types of the very best coffee from Brazil. The studio is situated one block from the hostel, and the coffee from the state Mina Gerais constitutes a large share of the Brazilian gourmet coffee on the international market.

 

Crafty owners keeping a low carbon footprint

All the guest rooms of the hostel are handcrafted by the hostel’s owners and themed with different sports. Michael stayed in the climbers’ room where the beds are mounted and suspended from the ceiling with ropes and karabiners. To access the top bunk, you need to use the little climbing wall they have installed to replace the traditional ladder. There is also a bicycle room, a skateboarder’s room and a surfers’ room.

 

Making ties with SEBRAE – the Brazilian “Innovation Norway”

During our stay in Belo Horizonte, we had a meeting with SEBRAE which is an institution supporting the development of small and micro companies in Brazil. Wanting to focus more on sustainability among small and micro companies, SEBRAE invited us to come back and present our project “Say HI to Sustainability” on a course for the 25 hostel managers of Associação Mineira de Hostels (the association of hostels in Mina Gerais). Although many of the hostels already are making efforts to lower their carbon footprint, they were inspired by the examples we shared from various HI hostels in Brazil.

 

Cover photo: The local artist Rogerio Fernandes has decorated the walls in the backyard of the hostel, making it an ideal area for small concerts and other events.