Almost 1000km from Rio and located in the barren sertão
of the Goiás highlands - very much in rural, peasant Brazil -
Brasília is the largest and most interesting of the world's
"planned cities". Declared the national capital in 1960, the
futuristic city is located in a federal zone of its own - Brasília
D.F. (Distrito Federal) - right in the centre of Goiás state. But
until the city's construction this was one of Brazil's most
isolated regions, and the opening up of communications, coupled
with a concerted drive to exploit the hinterland, has led to a
process of rapid transformation.
Much of the finance for Brasília, and for the Transamazonian
road network which has appeared over the last three or four
decades, was borrowed by the Brazilian authorities on a more or
less conditional basis - the condition being that they agreed to a
massive "development" campaign for the region. Funds and tax
incentives were made available to persuade some of the largest
national and international companies to take part, and by the late
1960s it suddenly became feasible (because of the new roads) and
economically viable (because of the favourable bureaucratic
assistance from Brasília) to drop bulldozers by helicopter into the
interior. The bulldozers felled trees around the edge of a clearing
until the perimeter met the path of another incoming bulldozer. In
this way, forest clearance on a gigantic scale led, in a
matter of years, to the creation of enormous pasture lands for beef
cattle, mostly for the European and American fast-food markets. One
of the worst aspects of this kind of development was that -
technically - the tax relief was only available to companies which
were utilizing at least half of the land they had claimed. Since
all that the companies were expected to do was to clear half the
land by felling the trees and burning off the stubble, forest
involvement for many of the largest companies was little more than
a financial game, the cost of which was the extermination of huge
tracts of the world's remaining virgin forest. Although cattle
ranching is still one of the leading industries in the region,
there are signs that this particular type of "development" is
slowing down: the tax advantages are now much less, and, on top of
that, most of the best and easily accessible land has already been
claimed and at least partly cleared.
Brasília's only real attraction - but reason enough to make the
effort - is its unique city architecture . The futuristic
forms of the National Theatre, cathedral and Congress buildings are
a sight you'll never forget: cold, concrete and utterly compelling
- though nowadays saplings planted in the last century are
beginning to green up the otherwise barren city centre. There are
parks and the large man-made Lago Paranoá close to the city
and, within day-trip distance, there's the small rural town of
Cristalina where crystals and semi-precious stones are more
common than bread. The city's also well connected by long, but
good-quality, roads to the rest of the country - to the Mato
Grosso to the west, to Belém and the Northeast, to Rio, São Paulo
and the South, and to the even more distant Rondônia and Acre in
the western Amazon.
At the heart of Brazil the states of Goiás and Tocantins
give birth to the mighty Araguaia and Tocantins rivers which divide
the Amazon basin and much of the Mato Grosso from the more
populated areas around Rio, Minas Gerais and the Northeast. It's a
huge, wild area, largely off the beaten tourist track. The state of
Goiás itself remained largely unexplored until this century. Much
of the northern half was composed of relatively virgin forest, a
haven for previously unknown Indian tribes. Today, long bus rides
take you into the scenic Chapada dos Veadeiros national park
and, in Tocantins, to the world's largest river island, the Ilha
do Bananal . Goiás is opening up to ecotourism based around the
extensive and distinctive sertão wilderness areas and the
historic towns of Pirenópolis and Goiás Velho . In
the south, the planned city of Goiânia is the state
capital.