Brasília

Brasília is the capital city of Brazil.

It is high up on flat land in the middle of the country. Workers built the whole city in just a few years. It has wide lawns, a big lake and buildings with amazing shapes.

Brasília is the capital of Brazil. It stands in the Federal District, a special area cut out of the state of Goiás, on a high, flat plateau more than 1,000 meters above the sea. Before the city was built, this was thinly settled countryside.

Brazil's capital used to be Rio de Janeiro, on the coast. Leaders wanted a new capital in the interior to help the middle of the country grow, so they built Brasília from scratch. It opened in 1960. Brazil's statistics office, IBGE, estimated that 2,996,899 people lived in the Federal District in 2025.

Brasília lies in the Federal District (Distrito Federal), carved out of Goiás state on Brazil's central plateau, at about 1,100 m, between the headwaters of the Tocantins, Paraná and São Francisco rivers. Moving the capital inland from Rio de Janeiro, to encourage the development of central Brazil, was advocated long before President Juscelino Kubitschek began the project in 1956.

UNESCO describes the city as created ex nihilo between 1956 and 1960 and as a definitive example of 20th-century modernist urbanism; it was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1987. The Federal District covers about 5,800 km². IBGE treats the whole district as the single municipality of Brasília and estimated its population at 2,996,899 on July 1, 2025. Most residents live outside the monumental government core.

Brasília has buildings with amazing shapes.

One building has a big round dome. Another looks like a giant bowl. The cathedral has curved arms that reach up to the sky.

The architect Oscar Niemeyer designed Brasília's most famous buildings. At the Square of Three Powers stand the three branches of Brazil's government: the National Congress, the Planalto Palace with the president's offices, and the Supreme Court.

The Congress is easy to spot: two tall office towers stand beside a white dome, where the Senate meets, and an upside-down bowl, where the Chamber of Deputies meets. The cathedral has 16 curving supports with tinted glass stretched between them. Visitors walk in through a passage under the ground instead of a front door.

Niemeyer's buildings line the Monumental Axis (Eixo Monumental). At its southeastern end, near Lake Paranoá, the executive, legislative and judicial buildings surround the Square of Three Powers, the conceptual heart of the city. The Congressional Palace is a composition of five parts: twin administrative towers, a white concrete dome for the Senate and an inverted bowl for the Chamber of Deputies, joined by a flat-roofed building below. The glass-faced Planalto Palace holds the presidential offices; the Palace of the Dawn (Palácio da Alvorada), the presidential residence, stands on a point of land in the lake.

The cathedral, which many consider Niemeyer's finest work, is parabolic: 16 curving supports meet in a ring 35 m above the floor of the nave, with tinted glass between them, and the nave is entered by an underground passage. Itamaraty Palace (foreign affairs), the Cláudio Santoro National Theater and embassies built in styles of their own countries add to the architecture.

Many families in Brasília live in apartment blocks.

The blocks stand on tall legs. Children can play on the grass underneath. Schools and shops are close by.

In the central city, people live in superquadras, or superblocks. Each superblock is a group of apartment buildings with its own schools, shops and open spaces. The buildings are about six stories high and stand on pillars, so the grass and gardens flow underneath them.

Many grown-ups in Brasília work for the government, and people from other countries work at the embassies. Most of the people of the Federal District live in the towns around the central city.

Costa's residential scale is organized into superquadras: groups of six-story apartment blocks raised on pylons so the landscape flows beneath them, each with a set number and type of schools, shops and open spaces. The government built both low-cost and luxury housing in the central area, while wealthy neighborhoods grew on the lakeshores, where planners had first imagined public parks.

The satellite towns, such as Gama, Ceilândia, Taguatinga, Núcleo Bandeirante, Sobradinho and Planaltina, were not planned as permanent settlements and contrast sharply with the symmetry of the Pilot Plan; most of the district's people live in them. Government services, small-scale industry, food services and construction are economically important, and embassy staff from many countries live in the city. Landscaping has softened the wide lawns that early critics compared to wastelands.