About this book:

Discover the story behind Brazil’s most famous planned capital—and the land that existed long before it. *Distrito Federal: A Concise History* takes readers from the ancient Indigenous paths, rivers, and cerrado landscapes of the Planalto Central to the republican dream of a capital in the nation’s heart, the rise of Brasília, and the lives of the candangos who built it.

This is more than the history of an architectural marvel. It is the story of a region shaped by Indigenous knowledge, expeditions, missions, farms, political ambition, modernist design, public power, migration, protest, inequality, and cultural invention. Clear, vivid, and wide-ranging, the book reveals Brasília not as a city born from nothing, but as the latest chapter in a deep and complex Brazilian history.

For anyone fascinated by Brazil, urbanism, politics, or the tensions between grand national dreams and everyday life, *Distrito Federal: A Concise History* offers a compelling journey through one of the country’s most important—and misunderstood—places.