Objective/Context:

This article presents the historical context of the creation of Goiânia, capital city of the state of Goiás, built in the 1930s as a symbol of the expansion of the demographic and agricultural frontier in central Brazil. The city emerged through the Pedro Ludovico Teixeira efforts, appointed state intervener by the President Getúlio Vargas. In the construction process, there was the boosters’s discourse, which attributed to the promised “metropolis” the power to create good opportunities for economic growth. For this, they relied on natural resources such as rivers, the presence of rich nearby forests and the fields with a less sloping region.

Methodology:

The study used archival sources based on technical and memorialist reports, photographs, maps, newspapers and periodicals of the time, as well as bibliography based on the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Environmental History.

Originality:

The historiography of Central Brazil has often been analyzed from the perspective of the frontier and not from the perspective of environmental history. In this paper, we seek to appropriate these two issues, reinforcing the relationship between the rural and urban processes of the Cerrado environmental history in Central Brazil.

Conclusions:

The real scenario was different from the announced one, since nature was much more a barrier than a facilitating element of development. In addition, the ideals of modern urbanism were partially abandoned due to the opportunism of selling lots. Also, the growth took place, but not because of the abundance of natural resources, but because of the transfer of the capital that fed it back as it attracted new inhabitants.

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