Qualla: Goiás (city)

Goiás (city): Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A_Patria_Brazileira.djvu: Virgílio Cardoso de Oliveira derivative work: OTAVIO1981, Public domain. Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva got his nickname by setting a bowl of brandy on fire. It was 1727. He was hunting gold in the central Brazilian highlands, and he had encountered the Goyaz people, who knew exactly where the gold deposits were and refused to tell him. According to the legend, Bueno poured brandy into a bowl and struck a flame to it. The Goyaz, seeing a man command fire from liquid, shouted Anhanguera - Old Devil - and revealed the locations of the mines. Thus the Arraial de Sant'anna was founded at the foot of the Serra Dourada - the Golden Mountains - and thus Bueno became, for the rest of his life and for four centuries of history after it, the Anhanguera. The Arraial would become Vila Boa de Goyaz, then the state capital, then a UNESCO World Heritage site. And the Golden Mountains really were golden for a while.

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Image: A_Patria_Brazileira.djvu: Virgílio Cardoso de Oliveira derivative work: OTAVIO1981 | Public domain

Goiás (city): Vila Boa de Goyaz

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1737 the Arraial was elevated to village status and renamed Vila Boa de Goyaz - Good Village of Goyaz, in archaic Portuguese. In 1748 the Royal Charter created the Captaincy of Goyaz, and Vila Boa became its capital. The first governor was Don Marcos de Noronha, known as the C...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Goiás (city): The Gold Runs Out

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jackson Oliveira, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the early 19th century the placers were exhausted. The easy gold was gone, and no deep mines were developed to replace it. The city pivoted to agriculture - cattle on the Serra Dourada slopes, subsistence farming in the valleys - and its cultural life stagnated in a pleasant w...

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Image: Jackson Oliveira | CC BY-SA 4.0

Goiás (city): When the Capital Moved Away

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antônio Ricardo Gomes de Souza, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1933, Governor Pedro Ludovico Teixeira decided the old Goias could not serve as a modern state capital. The streets were too narrow, the infrastructure nonexistent, the room to grow absent. He began building Goiania from scratch, 139 kilometers to the east. By 1937 the governm...

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Image: Antônio Ricardo Gomes de Souza | CC BY-SA 4.0

Goiás (city): Fogareu at Midnight

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Storni Machado, CC BY-SA 4.0. If you come to Goias city once, come on the Wednesday of Holy Week. At midnight, a group of men called farricocos - dressed in long medieval robes and tall pointed hoods, faces hidden - walk out of the Museum of Sacred Art of Boa Morte carrying torches. Drums start. The farricoco...

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Image: Ian Storni Machado | CC BY-SA 4.0

Goiás (city): The Poet of the Candy House

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antônio Ricardo Gomes de Souza, CC BY-SA 4.0. Ana Lins dos Guimaraes Peixoto Bretas was born in Goias city in 1889 and lived most of her life there, in one of the oldest houses in town, built in 1782. She wrote poetry from the age of 14, but she did not publish her first book until she was 75. In the meantime she supported h...

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Image: Antônio Ricardo Gomes de Souza | CC BY-SA 4.0