Chapter 01
A capital built for cars, not people
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Destination · Brazil
Brasilia, Brazil
A utopia that actually got built
Brazil's capital was invented whole from cerrado scrubland, and sixty years later it still hasn't decided what it is.
11 chapters ahead
Climate
High-plateau tropical — blazing dry winters, dramatic afternoon thunderstorms in summer, and almost no humidity by coastal Brazilian standards
Best season
May through August: the dry season keeps the sky clear and the heat bearable, which is when the city's architecture reads best against open blue
Atmosphere
- urban-midsize
- modernist
- design-forward
- sprawling
- artsy
- arid
- cosmopolitan
- intense
The chapters
11 ways to get lost here
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Chapter 02
The cerrado sets the table
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Chapter 03
Concrete that learned to breathe
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Chapter 04
The workers live somewhere else
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Chapter 05
Art made where ideology ran out of room
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Chapter 06
The festival the cerrado invented
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Chapter 07
The city that never stops being built
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Chapter 08
Bureaucracy as a way of life
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Chapter 09
The cerrado runs deeper than the city
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Chapter 10
Canberra knows this particular loneliness
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Chapter 11
The lake the engineers put there
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Keep wandering
You’ve finished Brasilia. Where next?
Pull a thread at random, fall into the world map, or step back to the front door for the latest dispatches.