Juiz de Fora

Machine translation of the Portuguese Wikipedia article (November 2026 version).

Juiz de Fora is a Brazilian municipality in the interior of the state of Minas Gerais, in the Southeast Region of the country. It is located in the Zona da Mata Mineira, about 260 km south-east of the state capital. It covers an area of approximately 1,440 km², of which 97 km² is urban area, and its population was estimated at 567,730 inhabitants in 2025, making it the fourth most populous municipality in Minas Gerais. The city is part of the industrial axis of the cities near the BR-040 and those near the BR-116 highways.

The municipality was emancipated from Barbacena in the 1850s. The best-known version of its etymology is that the name refers to a juiz de fora, a magistrate appointed by the Portuguese Crown to serve where there was no judge of law, who stayed briefly on a farm in the region, which then came to be known as the Sesmaria do Juiz de Fora.

It came to be known as the “Manchester Mineira” at the time when its pioneering role in industrialisation made it the most important municipality in the state. With the great economic crisis of 1929, the economy of the Minas Gerais municipalities linked to coffee growing suffered a severe blow, and Juiz de Fora only experienced a new period of development from the 1960s onwards. Its area of influence extends across the whole of the Zona da Mata Mineira, a small part of the South of Minas and also of the Centro Fluminense.

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