Qualla: Mozarlândia

Mozarlândia: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Henrique Silva Pessoa, Public domain. Mozart de Andrade Mota was a land surveyor when he arrived in 1952 at the confluence of two small rivers in the Araguaia valley of western Goias. He was there to map an agricultural colony called Barreirinho e Sao Joao. He bought land, cut it into lots, invited settlers. In 1954 someone put up the first hut. In 1958 the place became a district, and they renamed it Mozarlandia - Mozart's Land - in his honor. He served two terms as mayor, built the city hall and the jail and two plazas, donated land for schools and churches and the cemetery and the aerodrome, brought in electricity, and died in 1993. The town still carries his name. In a country where most place names come from saints or governors or indigenous words, having a town named after you because you built it is a rarer kind of memorial.

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Image: Henrique Silva Pessoa | Public domain

Mozarlândia: Surveyor's Country

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jhonatan Luiz Monteiro, CC BY-SA 4.0. Mota and his fellow surveyors - Pedro Leite da Silva and Edgar de Alencar Mota - worked for the state government, mapping out the colonias that Getulio Vargas and his successors had pushed to populate the interior. The confluence of the Barreirinho and Fogueira rivers was unremar...

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Image: Jhonatan Luiz Monteiro | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mozarlândia: Lakes and Little Rivers

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MTur Destinos, Public domain. The geography around Mozarlandia is soft. The terrain is flat enough that rivers braid and slow and pool, forming the lakes - Landi, Lolito, Pedra, Correia, da Onca, da Mae, Redondo, Cabaca - that scatter across the municipality. The main rivers are the Rio Tesouras and Rio do Pe...

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Image: MTur Destinos | Public domain

Mozarlândia: The Slaughterhouse

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MTur Destinos, Public domain. In the early 2000s a Frigorifico Bertin slaughterhouse opened in Mozarlandia. Bertin was at the time Brazil's largest beef exporter and Latin America's second-largest, and its Mozarlandia plant had the capacity to process 1,500 head of cattle per day. The beef went to Egypt, the ...

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Image: MTur Destinos | Public domain

Mozarlândia: The Numbers That Work

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DuduGyn, CC BY-SA 3.0. Unlike many municipalities in north-central Goias, Mozarlandia is growing. Its population rose more than 3,000 people from 1980 to the mid-2000s. Between 1996 and 2007 the geometric growth rate was 2.33 percent - slow but positive, which is not what the demographic charts of neig...

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Image: DuduGyn | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mozarlândia: A Name That Held

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DuduGyn, CC BY-SA 3.0. Place-naming in the Brazilian interior is an unsentimental business. Towns change names when political winds shift, when the old name becomes inconvenient, when a governor wants to honor a predecessor or a patron. Mozarlandia's name has held for nearly seventy years because the m...

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Image: DuduGyn | CC BY-SA 3.0