Qualla: Santa Cruz de Goiás

Santa Cruz de Goiás: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Santa Cruz de Goiás: Gold on the Cuiaba Road

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Santa Cruz de Goiás: A Judicial District Nearly the Size of a Kingdom

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Santa Cruz de Goiás: The Railroad Stopped Twenty-Eight Kilometers Short

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 C...

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Santa Cruz de Goiás: More People in the Fields Than in the Town

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Santa Cruz de Goiás: Rio dos Bois and the Hills With Names

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Virg...

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