Qualla: Vicente Pires

Vicente Pires: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Túllio F, CC BY-SA 4.0. The nickname is Buraco Pires - Pires Hole. Every rainy season, the asphalt of Vicente Pires gives way, and craters open in the streets deep enough to swallow a car's front wheel or a motorbike. Journalists photograph them. Neighbors post the worst ones online. The city's Civil Police lists Vicente Pires among the administrative regions where natural disasters are a genuine risk. All of this began with a legal fiction: in 1989 the government of Brazil's federal district granted 360 farmers a 30-year contract to farm 25 square kilometers of flat cerrado west of Brasília. The farmers barely planted a thing. Instead, they sold off house lots. Thirty-five years later, 72,879 people live on what was meant to be a rural production zone, and the roads they built themselves keep falling into the earth.

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Image: Túllio F | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vicente Pires: The Agricultural Colony That Wasn't

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Túllio F, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the 1970s, when Brasília was still new and the land west of the federal capital was mostly empty cerrado, a handful of farmers settled onto what the government called the Águas Claras Agricultural Colony. In 1989, Governor José Aparecido decided to expand the colony idea to ad...

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Image: Túllio F | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vicente Pires: The Name of a Stream, Not a Man

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Isabela Nunes Torres, CC BY-SA 4.0. The official version says the name Vicente Pires came from a small stream that runs through the region, and that the stream in turn was named for an early settler - Vicente Pires da Mota - who owned land here. No one seems entirely sure when he lived or what he did. There is a li...

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Image: Isabela Nunes Torres | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vicente Pires: Dismembered from Taguatinga

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Túllio F, CC BY-SA 4.0. Until May 26, 2009 - exactly 20 years after the first farms were established - Vicente Pires was legally part of Taguatinga, one of the original satellite cities of the federal district. On that date, Law 4327 made it an administrative region in its own right, with its own admini...

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Image: Túllio F | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vicente Pires: The Seasons of Central Brazil

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Senado Federal, CC BY 2.0. Vicente Pires sits at roughly 1,100 meters on the Brazilian Highlands, and the climate follows the cerrado pattern: a rainy season from October to April, a dry season from May to September. In the heart of the dry season, relative humidity drops below 30 percent, low enough that ...

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Image: Senado Federal | CC BY 2.0

Vicente Pires: Growing Up Without a Plan

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Túllio F, CC BY-SA 4.0. Most of Vicente Pires was built without the kind of urban master planning that defined the rest of Brasília. Brasília's superblocks were laid out by Lúcio Costa in the 1950s. Vicente Pires was laid out by whoever happened to be selling lots that week. Power, public lighting, and ...

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Image: Túllio F | CC BY-SA 4.0