Inhotim, Brazil: A Versailles for the 21st century We spent two days in our Versailles. The first we bought shuttle passes to see the farthest-flung art, a mile and a quarter from the entrance (the shuttle is a fleet of zippy golf carts), and walked the second. The first installation to suck air from my lungs was Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's Forty-Part Motet. Imagine a white room with 40 black speakers raised to eye-level on slim black stands. Cardiff and Miller recorded the individual voices of 40 members of the Salisbury Cathedral choir singing Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium, a tribute to the first Queen Elizabeth. Each speaker projects just one voice. The result is both magisterial and intimate, simultaneously, and it dramatically reveals your own ability to hear individual sounds - a soprano's caught breath - within gorgeous multiplicity. Outdoors, we considered taking a running leap into Jorge Macchi's Piscina - a pool with a descending flight of steps painted with letters of the alphabet - but had no change of clothes (visitors are encouraged to dive in). And we were awed by Giuseppe Penone's Suspended Tree, a large, healthy tree growing in mid-air, its roots grafted onto the trunks of smaller host trees that grow in a surrounding circle. An eerily elegant living sculpture. One of the great astonishments of Inhotim, which is privately owned by Bernardo Paz, a Brazilian mining magnate, is viewing artists' work in purpose-built pavilions. How often, if ever, do you get to see that kind of holistic display? We found the results extraordinary, especially at the Galeria Adriana Varejão, dedicated to an internationally known Brazilian artist once married to Paz. Offset with crystalline reflecting pools and connected by stairs and walkways that play with reflection, light and shadow, the Varejão galleries set up an exchange with both the art - her trademark tiled installations, which use colonial media to comment on colonialism - and its viewers. The Galeria Miguel Rio Branco is another landmark: a building that rears out of exuberant tropical growth like a bright orange, oxidised ship's hull, its cargo being Rio Branco's photographs, notable for both their narrative intensity and technical innovation (imagine images of sharks printed on cloths that hang in a fan-generated breeze, so that they seem to move with the grace of underwater currents). Between installations and galleries is a cultivated, tropical profusion of gardens, copses, pools and landscapes capped by distant hills that are almost more mind-bending than the punctuations of human creativity. Orchids and bromeliads, immense tamboril trees and perfectly fanned palms all explode with a barely contained exuberance of size and hue unknown to northern vegetation. Walking paths wind through the growth and serve as - in Malcolm's words again - "palette cleansers" between artworks. We all commented that after a full day of viewing we were more energised than exhausted, which would never have been the case had we spent the same amount of time in a traditional museum. No visual overload, no sore feet. And we were exhilarated, too. Inhotim's creative impulse is contagious, and we felt challenged to frame its treasures, man-made and natural, in our cameras all day long, yoking and unyoking others' ideas. Inhotim made us into artists. The basics Getting there A direct, 14-hour flight from Heathrow to São Paulo on KLM (klm.com) costs about £695 return. Bienal de São Paulo You'll want to be in São Paulo this autumn, as it's the 30th anniversary of the second hippest art biennial on earth (after Venice's), the Bienal de São Paulo (bienal.org.br), which runs until December 9. Inhotim After you've seen art inside, fly to Belo Horizonte. Flights on TAM Air (tam.com.br) start at around £130 return. Then take a bus from the central bus station to Inhotim to see art outside. The journey takes about 90 minutes so best overnight in Inhotim: the Pousada Lafevi (www.pousadalafevi.com.br) in nearby Brumadinho offers double rooms for about £65 a night. Entrance to Inhotim (www.inhotim.org.br) costs £6 during the week and £8 on weekends; it's free on Tuesdays and closed on Mondays; shuttle passes cost £5 per person.