A Brazilian mogul's garden of exotic art

A view through "Viewing Machine," by the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, at Inhotim, a contemporary art complex in the hills of southeast Brazil that scatters more than 500 works across a botanical garden. Photographs by Lalo De Almeida for The New York Times

About 1,000 employees, including curators, botanists and concrete pourers, swarm around Inhotim, his contemporary-art complex spread over 2,000 hectares in the hills of southeast Brazil. Art pilgrims absorb stunning works like Doug Aitken's "Sonic Pavilion," which uses high-sensitivity microphones placed in a 192-meter hole to deliver the bass murmur of Earth's inner depths.

Amid Inhotim's eucalyptus forests, Mr. Paz has perched more than 500 works by foreign and Brazilian artists. His botanical garden contains more than 1,400 species of palm trees. He glows when speaking of Inhotim's rare and otherworldly plants, like the titun arum from Sumatra, called the "corpse flower" because of its hideous stench. Mr. Paz, a lanky, chain-smoking, 61-year-old mining magnate, speaks in whispers. He married his sixth wife in October and she is pregnant with his seventh child. He has white hair down to his shoulders and pale blue eyes.

"This is a project to last 1,000 years," Mr. Paz said of Inhotim.

Elsewhere in Latin America, majestic private contemporary-art collections have been made accessible to the public, like Eugenio Lopez's Coleccion Jumex in Mexico City. And in an archipelago in Japan's Seto Inland Sea, the Benesse Art Site similarly blends cutting-edge architecture with contemporary art.

But none of these places have the exuberance of Inhotim, situated in the mining-scarred hills of Mata Atlantica, the forest that once covered the region. Art historians and curators marvel at the sheer scale and vision that Mr. Paz has created.

"The amount of space given to single artist projects is unparalleled, as is the way visitors travel from building to building, refreshing their senses, being in nature," said Beverly Adams, an authority on Latin American art.

Overwhelming the cognoscenti still seems to thrill Mr. Paz, a high school dropout. He worked at Belo Horizonte's stock exchange, which he said he loathed, before going into mining for iron ore and cobbling together a privately held business empire that finances Inhotim's operations.

Some works in Inhotim seem to question, if not actually insult, the concept of profiting from mining the Earth's treasures. For instance, an installation by the American artist Matthew Barney within geodesic domes includes a scene of environmental violation: a huge mud-caked tractor clutching a tree and its roots. To arrive, visitors trek through mineral-bearing hills.

Inhotim received 250,000 visitors in 2011. Mr. Paz says his companies provide Inhotim with about $60 million to $70 million annually for operations. In order to make Inhotim self-sustaining, he said he was planning to build 10 hotels here, an amphitheater for 15,000 people, even a complex of "lofts" for those who want to live amid the collection. He said Inhotim has room for at least 2,000 more works of art. Inhotim's growth the past decade has provided a jolt to the surrounding economy, with many of the residents of villages nearby employed by Inhotim, making them dependent on Mr. Paz's vision of assembling a "Disneyland" for contemporary art.

"Before Inhotim, our men worked in the mines or moved to Sao Paulo to make money," said Profira de Souza, 74, a resident of the village of Marinhos whose son and grandson work at Inhotim. "God lowered Bernardo Paz down to us, and I pray he doesn't take him back too soon."

Asked about specific works, Mr. Paz shifts the conversation. Other things at Inhotim draw his interest, like the towering tamboril trees or the traira, a carnivorous fish in the ponds here that can draw blood from visitors' fingers.

"There are works of art here which I haven't entered yet, which everyone told me were spectacular, but why should I go in there?" Mr. Paz said. "I don't consider myself passionate for art. But gardens, that's what I like."