Why Brazil built Brasília

Two capitals on the coast

Salvador was founded in 1549 on a peninsula at the mouth of the Bay of All Saints, and it was the capital of Portuguese America until 1763. It grew into Brazil’s main port and a centre of the sugar industry and the slave trade.^[4]

In 1763 the capital moved south to Rio de Janeiro. Salvador was the better-equipped city, but gold had been found inland in Minas Gerais, and the crown wanted its capital closer to the mines, where smuggling was a risk.^[5] Rio stayed the capital until 1960.^[1]

A capital on paper

The idea of moving the capital inland is older than independent Brazil’s institutions. In 1823, in the assembly drafting the empire’s first constitution, José Bonifácio, known as the “Patriarch of Independence”, proposed moving it and suggested calling the new city Brasília.^[6]

The republic’s first constitution, of 24 February 1891, made it law. Article 3 set aside a zone of 14,400 square kilometres on the central plateau for the future federal capital, and said that once the capital moved, the old federal district around Rio would become a state.^[3]

In 1892 a commission of 21 people led by the Belgian astronomer Louis Cruls went to the plateau and marked out the 14,400 km², which became known as the Cruls Quadrilateral.^[6] On 7 September 1922, the centenary of independence, President Epitácio Pessoa had a foundation stone for the future capital laid on a hill near Planaltina.^[7]

Built in under four years

Building the new capital was part of President Juscelino Kubitschek’s plan to modernise the country.^[2] A law he signed on 19 September 1956 fixed the site in the Planalto Central, set up a state company to build the city, and gave it the name Brasília.^[8]

Lúcio Costa’s city plan, the Plano Piloto, laid the city out along a monumental east–west axis crossed by a curving north–south one, with Oscar Niemeyer’s government buildings where they meet: the Three Powers Square and the Esplanade of the Ministries.^[2] Around 100,000 workers, engineers and technicians worked around the clock, and the city was built in under four years.^[1]

Kubitschek called it a geopolitical revolution: “After having camped for nearly two hundred years by the water’s edge, Brazil will take possession of its territory.”^[1] The cost made a dent in the public finances for years afterwards.^[1]

What happened to Rio

Brasília was inaugurated on 21 April 1960.^[1] A week earlier Kubitschek signed the law that turned the old federal district into a state, as the 1891 constitution had foreseen: Rio de Janeiro stopped being the capital of Brazil and became the capital of a city-state called Guanabara.^[9]

Guanabara lasted fifteen years. Under the military government, a 1974 law merged it with the surrounding state of Rio de Janeiro, and the merger took effect in 1975.^[9] Brasília itself was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1987 as a landmark of modernist town planning.^[2]