Niemeyer · Kubitschek · Cerrado Nations · The People Who Built Brasília

Brasília was built by two kinds of people: the visionaries who dreamed it, and the workers who made it real. President Juscelino Kubitschek promised to deliver “fifty years of progress in five” — and Brasília was his proof. Oscar Niemeyer, already one of the world’s great architects, designed the civic buildings that would make the city a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Lúcio Costa laid out the Pilôt Plan — the city’s famous bird-or-aeroplane shape — in a master plan that remains one of the most celebrated pieces of urban design in history.

But the city was also built by the candangos — the migrant workers, mostly from Brazil’s impoverished Northeast, who poured the concrete, laid the roads, and raised the buildings in conditions of extraordinary hardship. Many stayed, forming the satellite cities that surround the Pilôt Plan and giving Brasília its full human complexity. And long before any of them arrived, the Cerrado was home to Indigenous nations — the Kayapó, the Xavante, the Bororo — whose relationship with this ancient savanna landscape stretches back thousands of years. Their presence, their knowledge, and their culture remain part of the living fabric of the region.