Brazil's Art Deco capital and the gateway to the Cerrado — where Goiânia's 1933 master plan produced a city of radial boulevards, monumental public buildings, and Art Deco civic architecture more coherent than any other planned city in South America, the Cerrado (the world's most biodiverse savanna, covering 2 million sq km of central Brazil) begins at the city's edge, a live music scene of sertanejo, pagode, and gospel has made Goiânia the most musically productive city in Brazil per capita, and the Goiás colonial mining towns (Pirenópolis, Cidade de Goiás UNESCO) are within 2 hours
Goiânia (1.5 million; metro 2.6 million) is the capital of Goiás state in central Brazil — one of Brazil's youngest state capitals (founded 1933 as a planned replacement for the colonial gold-rush town of Cidade de Goiás), designed by urban planner Attílio Corrêa Lima in a rationalist modernist style that makes it one of the most coherent planned cities in South America. The city sits in the transition zone between the Cerrado (the world's most biodiverse tropical savanna, larger than the European Union, covering 21% of Brazil's territory) and the Atlantic Forest, a geographic position that m…
The Goiás region was inhabited by the Goiá, Kayapó, and other Jê-speaking Indigenous peoples for thousands of years before Portuguese contact. Gold was discovered in the Goiás region in 1725, triggering the Goiás gold rush and the founding of Vila Boa de Goiás (later Cidade de Goiás) as the colonial mining capital. The gold rush lasted until the 1770s when deposits were exhausted, leaving Cidade de Goiás as an isolated backwater. In 1933, the newly elected governor Pedro Ludovico Teixeira chose to build a new capital rather than modernise the old colonial town — commissioning urban planner At…