Brasília

The idea of an inland capital is older than the city — the republican constitution of 1891 called for the capital to move to the centre of the country — and in 1922, for the centenary of independence, President Epitácio Pessoa had a foundation stone set up on the plateau to mark the future site. It was Juscelino Kubitschek who built it. In 1957 an international jury chose Lúcio Costa's plan — two crossing axes, often likened to a bird or an aeroplane, one monumental for government and one residential, lined with superblocks of six-storey flats meant to work as self-contained neighbourhoods. Oscar Niemeyer designed the main public buildings, Joaquim Cardozo engineered them and Roberto Burle Marx laid out the gardens. The Palácio da Alvorada was finished in 1958, the Paranoá River was dammed to form a lake, and the city was built in 41 months and inaugurated on 21 April 1960.

The new Federal District had almost 140,000 residents at the 1960 census. Costa had planned the Plano Piloto for about 500,000 people, a figure it never reached; instead the workers who built the city and the migrants who followed settled in satellite towns such as Taguatinga and Ceilândia, which now hold most of the population. Construction continued for years — the cathedral was dedicated and the Itamaraty Palace inaugurated in 1970 — and under the military government the capital grew into its role. In 1987 UNESCO inscribed the city as a World Heritage Site for its modernist architecture and planning.

The JK Bridge opened across the lake in 2002, and in 2017 UNESCO named Brasília a City of Design. On 8 January 2023, a week after the presidential inauguration, rioters invaded and damaged the Congress, the Planalto Palace and the Supreme Federal Court on the Three Powers Plaza; it took security forces more than five hours to clear them.

Brasília is a city of arrivals. People came from every state to build it and to staff its ministries, and with around 124 embassies, a university founded in 1962 and a steady flow of officials and students, it has no single regional identity. The city's architecture is its best-known cultural asset, and the modernist buildings, sculpture and gardens along the Esplanade are treated as a shared civic heritage.

In the 1980s the city produced the rock bands that made Brasília known as a capital of Brazilian rock: Aborto Elétrico, whose former members formed Capital Inicial, as well as Legião Urbana, Plebe Rude and Raimundos. The Rock Basement festival still brings new bands to national attention. The Festival de Brasília, founded in 1965 as Brazilian Film Week, is the oldest film festival in Brazil.

The calendar mixes national and local occasions. In June the festas juninas fill the city with dancing and stalls, and on 7 September the Independence Day parade takes place on the Esplanade. Religion takes many forms, from the Catholic cathedral and the blue-lit Dom Bosco Sanctuary to the Valley of the Dawn, a spiritual movement founded in the 1960s whose mother temple is in Planaltina, at the edge of the Federal District.

About 2.8 million people lived in the Federal District at the 2022 census, making Brasília the third-largest city in Brazil after São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The Federal District has no municipalities and is divided into 35 administrative regions, one of which, the Plano Piloto, contains the planned city with the government buildings. Most residents live outside it, in fast-growing satellite cities such as Ceilândia, Taguatinga and Águas Claras, and the population is still growing quickly through migration.

Government is the economy: ministries, courts, Congress, embassies and the services around them employ a large share of the workforce, and the literacy rate is above the national average. To protect the World Heritage Site, the local government favours non-polluting industries such as software, film and gemology over heavy industry. The contrast between the well-off Plano Piloto and lakeside districts and the poorer outer regions is a constant theme of local life.

The working day starts early and traffic is heavy at rush hours, as commuters drive or take buses and the metro from the satellite cities into the centre. Life is organised around the superblock, with its schools, shops and church close by, and around the car. At weekends the Esplanade empties, while the City Park, the clubs and restaurants on the lake and the bars of the wings fill up.

Brasília has no old cuisine of its own; it eats the food of the whole country, brought by the migrants who built and staffed it. Many of the city's best restaurants are in Asa Sul, where the commercial strips between the superblocks hold restaurants serving the cooking of many Brazilian regions and countries side by side. The por quilo buffet, where diners pay by the weight of their plate, is the usual weekday lunch for office workers.

The surrounding cerrado shapes the regional flavours. Neighbouring Goiás cooks with pequi, a strongly scented cerrado fruit, and pamonha, a paste of fresh maize boiled in its husk. Snack bars and cafés sell pão de queijo, the small cheese breads of neighbouring Minas Gerais.

Eating out often means the lakeshore, where restaurants and bars in Lago Sul and Lago Norte look out over the water, or the commercial strips of the wings, where bars set tables on the pavement in the evening. Pizzaria Dom Bosco has branches in several districts, and the Feira da Torre around the TV Tower is another place to browse and snack.