Abadiânia has been a municipality since 1953, but the town you drive through today is not where it began. The original site was awkward to reach, and the residents fixed that themselves rather than waiting for anyone else to. House by house, they rebuilt along the highway eighteen kilometres away, until by the 1960s the town had effectively relocated to the road. The road is the BR-060, the artery linking Brasília to Anápolis and Goiânia, and Abadiânia sits on it 88 kilometres from the state capital. Long before it was famous for anything, it was a place where you stopped for fuel and lunch on the way to somewhere else. The surrounding land does what land in this part of Goiás does: corn, rice, soybeans and cattle. The 2006 agricultural census counted 1,150 farms, some 52,000 hectares of pasture, and a herd of 41,665.

In 1978 João Teixeira de Faria opened a centre on the edge of town called the Casa de Dom Inácio de Loyola. Faria, born in 1942, presented himself as a medium through whom spirits performed healings, and he became known as João de Deus - John of God. Over four decades the Casa drew people from across Brazil, then from Europe, North America and Australia, many of them seriously ill and most arriving at the end of long flights and longer hopes. Guidebooks, and eventually American daytime television, called Abadiânia the City of Spiritual Cures. At its peak the town received roughly four thousand visitors a week. Pousadas multiplied along the approach roads, and with them came crystal shops, vegetarian kitchens, taxi drivers, translators and laundries - an entire service economy oriented toward one building and one man.

That December a Brazilian television programme broadcast the accounts of women who said Faria had sexually abused them during private consultations. Twelve came forward first. When Goiás state authorities opened a channel for reports, more than two hundred complaints arrived within thirty hours, from nine Brazilian states and from outside the country; the eventual total approached six hundred women, describing incidents spread across three decades. Faria's own daughter, Dalva, spoke publicly in support of them and said she had been abused as a child. What the women described was not exotic and not mysterious. It was the ordinary mechanism of unaccountable authority - a closed room, a person in pain and far from home, and a man whose word an entire town depended on. Prosecutors called for his arrest on 12 December 2018. He surrendered four days later.

The convictions arrived in sequence, case by case, in the courts of Goiás. On 19 December 2019 Faria was sentenced to 19 years and 4 months for the rape of four women. In January 2020 came a further 40 years for the rape of five women at the Casa. In September 2023 a single ruling covering seventeen cases added 118 years, 6 months and 15 days, for rape, rape by fraud, and rape of a vulnerable person. Across more than a dozen separate proceedings the cumulative total once reached 489 years. Appellate rulings have since cut that sharply: by May 2026, after judges applied statute-of-limitations findings and other reductions on appeal, the combined sentence stood at roughly 214 years, with some proceedings still under appeal. Since 2021, on grounds of his age and health, he has served that sentence at home under electronic monitoring.

The pilgrimages ended almost at once. A town geared to four thousand arrivals a week was soon receiving fewer than a hundred, and of the sixty-eight hotels and pousadas, eight were still functioning. What became of the other sixty is the part nobody planned. The buildings were too large and too specifically designed to sell easily, so they were repurposed instead: some into drug recovery centres, some into nursing homes, a good number into evangelical churches - a particular kind of turn in a town that had spent forty years explaining itself to the world as spiritist. The Casa did not vanish either. It operates in a much reduced form, and Brazilian reporting has noted that Faria retains influence over its administration.

Abadiânia counted 17,232 residents at the 2022 census, and the great majority of them never worked at the Casa. There are two waterfalls people come for on their own account, the Cachoeira do Ribeirão Curralinho and the Cachoeira Pedregulho, along with the Corumbá River and a calendar of religious festivals that long predates any of this. The town still has no hospital of its own; it had eighteen schools and 3,369 students in 2006. It is 88 kilometres from Goiânia and a little over an hour from Brasília, and it remains what it was in 1953 - a place on the way to somewhere. That is a thinner identity than City of Spiritual Cures. It is also one that does not depend on anybody.