The cross came first, and the town was named after it. In 1729, on a rise in the Goias backcountry where mule drivers bound for the mines of Cuiaba had struck gold eight years earlier, the bandeirante Manoel Dias da Silva planted a large wooden cross and cut into it the words Viva el Rei de Portugal. He announced that a settlement called Santa Cruz would stand on the spot. It did, and it still does, though almost everything else about the place has since been reversed. The district it once governed shrank. The railroad it expected never arrived. For nine years in the twentieth century, the town was not even allowed to keep its name.
The route west to the Cuiaba goldfields ran through this country, and in 1721 mule drivers working that road found gold in the streams here. What followed was the standard sequence of the Brazilian interior in the eighteenth century: a strike, a rush, a chapel, a name. Dwellings clustered around the cross and around a chapel dedicated to Nossa Senhora da Conceicao, who remains the town's patroness. The wealth that came out of these creeks was extracted overwhelmingly by enslaved Africans, brought inland along the same roads as the mules and worked in the gravel and water of the streambeds - a fact the surviving colonial-era account books record more carefully than they record the names of the people themselves. Santa Cruz became a parish in 1759. Its origins in the 1720s make it one of the genuinely old settlements of Goias, a state where most municipalities date from the twentieth century.
Colonial administration in the interior worked at scales that now look absurd. When the territory of Goias was divided, Santa Cruz became the seat of a julgado - a judicial district - that covered an area approaching the size of Portugal. From a settlement of a few hundred people, magistrates exercised authority over an enormous stretch of cerrado in which most of the population had never seen the town. In 1833 Santa Cruz was raised to vila, and in 1884 a provincial law made it a city. Then the shrinking began in earnest, as one piece after another of that vast jurisdiction was carved off into municipalities of its own. Palmelo, Cristianopolis, and Pires do Rio all lie in territory Santa Cruz once answered for.
In 1922 the first railroad reached this part of Goias - and halted twenty-eight kilometers away. The station was named Pires do Rio, and the town that grew around the platform became the commercial center of the region, the place where the roads met and the freight moved. Santa Cruz, older by nearly two centuries, was left to the side of the map. The indignity was formalized in 1938, when the municipality was demoted to a mere district, and completed in 1943, when that district was renamed Corumbalina. It got its status and its name back only in 1949, with the new administration installed on the first of January. Today Pires do Rio is the regional center and Santa Cruz de Goias is 33 kilometers west of it, a quiet detour rather than a destination.
Santa Cruz is one of the rare Brazilian municipalities where the countryside still outnumbers the streets, and by a wide margin. In 2007 some 2,535 people lived in the rural area against 1,007 in town, at an overall density of 3.19 inhabitants per square kilometer. The population has fallen by roughly 500 since 1980, the familiar arithmetic of young people leaving for Goiania or Uberlandia. What holds is the land itself: 725 farms across 97,104 hectares, a herd of 65,000 cattle including 15,000 milk cows, ten thousand hectares of soybeans, and older crops that persist alongside them - rice, beans, manioc, coffee, bananas, corn. Three hundred sixteen tractors work the municipality. In 2000, adult literacy stood at 87.5 percent, slightly above the national average, and infant mortality at 14.0 per thousand against a national figure of 33.0.
The Rio dos Bois runs north to south through the municipality on its way to the Corumba, joined by the Rio do Peixe and by a roll call of small watercourses that reads like a poem written by someone who knew every one of them: Muquem, Buriti, Pedra de Amolar, Agua Suja, Mato Virgem, Corrego da Chuva. The terrain rises into the Serra do Rio do Peixe and the Serra dos Macacos, with individual hills called Dois Irmaos, Cuscuzeiro, Cabeca de Mel, Capao Bonito. There are waterfalls out among them. The climate is tropical humid, wet in summer and dry in winter. Nobody has yet built a tourism industry on any of it, which is precisely what makes the drive out from Pires do Rio worth taking.
Santa Cruz de Goias lies at 17.3158 degrees south, 48.4819 degrees west, in southeast Goias about 121 kilometers from Goiania. From 5,000 to 8,000 feet AGL the small urban core reads as a pale patch against a heavily rural landscape - this is one of the least densely settled municipalities in the region, at about three people per square kilometer. Use the Rio dos Bois, running north to south toward the Corumba River, as the primary line feature, with the Serra do Rio do Peixe and Serra dos Macacos providing relief on either side. Pires do Rio, 33 kilometers east, is the larger and easier visual fix and sits on the rail line. Palmelo is immediately east as well. Nearest major airports are Goiania / Santa Genoveva (SBGO) to the northwest and Brasilia (SBBR) to the north. Dry-season flying from May to September gives the cleanest air; wet-season afternoons build strong convection over the plateau.