Qualla: Orizona

Orizona: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arley da Cruz, CC BY-SA 4.0. Forty-two people voted. That was the entire electorate for the 1943 public contest to rename the Goias town of Campo Formoso. Dr. Raphael Leme Franco submitted the winning entry: Orizona, from oriza meaning rice and zona meaning region. Region of Rice. The other finalists were Caruaba, Coema, Manhana, Porangatu, Potira, Jubara, and Oriza. The rice association has largely faded, but the bet on a concise geographic name has held up. Today Orizona produces something else besides rice, and it produces enough of it to send exports abroad. About thirty small distilleries here turn sugarcane into cachaça, the Brazilian spirit that is not rum but close enough to cause international confusion.

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Image: Arley da Cruz | CC BY-SA 4.0

Orizona: From Chapel to Contest

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ANSELMO PEREIRA DE LIMA, Public domain. The town began in 1850 when Joaquim Fernandes de Castro and Jose Pereira Cardoso began building a chapel on the banks of the Ribeirao Santa Barbara, a tributary of the Corumba River. The pattern is familiar across central Brazil. Chapel, then village, then district, then city, ea...

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Image: ANSELMO PEREIRA DE LIMA | Public domain

Orizona: The Cachaça Question

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ANSELMO PEREIRA DE LIMA, Public domain. Cachaça is not rum, and people in Orizona take this seriously. Rum is distilled from molasses, a byproduct of refining sugar. Cachaça is distilled from freshly-pressed sugarcane juice, which gives it a cleaner, more vegetal flavor profile. Brazilians call it pinga, caninha, aguar...

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Image: ANSELMO PEREIRA DE LIMA | Public domain

Orizona: Milk in Quantities

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ANSELMO PEREIRA DE LIMA, Public domain. Orizona is the fifth-largest milk producer in Goias. Several milk processing factories receive over a million liters a day. Out of roughly two thousand milk producers, about 90 percent are small farmers, which means the dairy economy here is built on a dense network of small oper...

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Image: ANSELMO PEREIRA DE LIMA | Public domain

Orizona: The Rural Share

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ANSELMO PEREIRA DE LIMA, Public domain. Something unusual for Goias shows up in the census data. A large part of the Orizona population still lives in the countryside. In 2007, 7,673 people lived in the urban area, and 6,707 lived in the rural area. That is close to a fifty-fifty split, in a state where most municipali...

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Image: ANSELMO PEREIRA DE LIMA | Public domain