Qualla: Goiás, Goiás

Goiás, Goiás: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Goiás Velho is what everyone else calls it, though residents prefer Goiás or Cidade de Goiás because Velho - Old - sounds pejorative. People born here are vilaboenses, named for the settlement's colonial title, Vila Boa. It is a small town now - 22,381 residents in 2020, down from 42,958 in 1980, a population collapse of more than 42 percent in forty years. That collapse is the story. When a place loses half its people and keeps most of its buildings, when a capital moves and leaves its infrastructure behind, you get a rare kind of time capsule: an entire colonial city preserved because nobody had the money or the need to tear it down. In 2001 UNESCO added the historic center to the World Heritage List. The town had been working toward this distinction, quietly, for the previous sixty years.

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Goiás, Goiás: The Anhanguera Founds a Town

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva - called the Anhanguera, Old Devil, for a brandy-and-fire trick he pulled to frighten the Goyaz people into revealing their gold deposits - founded the Arraial de Sant'Anna here in 1727 at the foot of the Serra Dourada. The name of the region, Goyaz, was...

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Goiás, Goiás: The Gold Ran Out. The Buildings Stayed.

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By the early 19th century the easy placer gold was exhausted, and no deep-mining infrastructure emerged to replace it. The city turned to cattle and subsistence farming. A long, slow economic sleep began - which, paradoxically, is exactly what kept the colonial buildings standing...

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Goiás, Goiás: Cora Coralina

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ana Lins dos Guimaraes Peixoto Bretas was born in Goiás Velho in 1889 and spent most of her long life there - 96 years of it. She lived in a house dating from 1782, one of the oldest in town. She wrote poems starting at age 14 but did not publish her first collection until 1965, ...

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Goiás, Goiás: Fogareu at Midnight

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Procession of the Fogareu happens on the Wednesday before Easter. At midnight, farricocos - men in long medieval robes and tall pointed hoods, faces completely covered - walk out of a darkened church carrying torches. Drums begin. The farricocos break into a run through the c...

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Goiás, Goiás: What Is Left and What Is Coming

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The municipality covers 3,108 square kilometers, much of it rugged terrain crossed by rivers - the Rio Vermelho, Uru, do Peixe, Ferreira, Indio. Part of the 26,626-hectare Serra Dourada State Park, created in 2003, falls within its boundaries. Waterfalls are accessible from the c...

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