Qualla: Valparaíso de Goiás

Valparaíso de Goiás: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A civil engineer from Valparaíso, Chile, arrived in Brazil in the late 1970s to oversee the first housing project of a new city that did not yet have a name. He called it, informally, after his hometown - Valparaízo, with a z, as the Chileans write it. The engineer is largely forgotten now. The spelling eventually shifted to Valparaíso with an s to conform to Brazilian Portuguese. But two neighborhoods in the city still carry the original Chilean orthography: Valparaízo I and Valparaízo II. They are the only public trace of the man whose home lent his name to a place he would otherwise have had no reason to visit.

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Valparaíso de Goiás: The Satellite That Grew

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Valparaíso de Goiás is 25 kilometers southwest of Brasília, on the plateau known as the Planalto Central. It belongs to what Brazilian planners call the Entorno do Distrito Federal - the capital's surround - a ring of satellite cities that grew up outside the federal boundaries t...

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Valparaíso de Goiás: Who Builds a City, and for Whom

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Brasília was designed in the late 1950s by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer to be the most rationally planned capital in the world. What was never rationally planned was where the construction workers would live. The bus drivers, the cooks, the cleaners, the waiters, the security g...

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Valparaíso de Goiás: A Ring of Neighbors

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The municipality borders the federal district to the north and the older municipality of Luziânia to the south. On the east sits Cidade Ocidental, on the west Novo Gama - all of them satellite cities in their own right, forming a contiguous ring of Brasília's commuter belt. BR-04...

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Valparaíso de Goiás: Numbers That Tell a Story

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Valparaíso scores better than most satellite cities on the measures that define a Brazilian municipality's human development. In 2007 there were no hospitals at all, which meant medical emergencies had to be driven across the border into Brasília. The infant mortality rate was 18...

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Valparaíso de Goiás: A Name That Did Not Belong

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The actual Valparaíso - the Chilean port city, pronounced Val-pa-rah-EE-so, whose name in Spanish means Valley of Paradise - sits on the Pacific coast, a city of hills and funiculars and painted houses, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2003. The Chilean engineer who worked on a...

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