🇧🇷 Brazil · Central-West
Cidade de Goiás, affectionately known as Goiás Velho, is the old colonial capital of the state of Goiás and one of the best-preserved colonial urban ensembles in central Brazil. Founded as Vila Boa at the height of the 18th-century gold cycle, it keeps cobbled streets, white houses with red roofs, baroque churches and a historic center that was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2001.
The town lies along the banks of the Rio Vermelho, at the foot of the Serra Dourada, in a cerrado landscape that turns dry and golden in winter. Its quiet atmosphere, its rich craft and literary tradition —it was the birthplace of the poet Cora Coralina— and its Goiás cooking make it an endearing destination, very different from the bustle of the big capitals.
This guide covers the essentials of Cidade de Goiás: its historic center and churches, Cora Coralina's house-museum, its famous religious festivals such as the Procissão do Fogaréu, Goiás cooking and how to get there from Goiânia. It is an ideal escape for anyone after history, art and the calm of a colonial town stopped in time.
Founded around 1727 as Arraial de Sant'Ana during the gold rush led by the bandeirante Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva (the Anhanguera), it became Vila Boa and later the capital of the captaincy and province of Goiás. It held that rank until 1937, when the capital moved to the newly built Goiânia. Its exceptional colonial ensemble earned it the UNESCO World Heritage title in 2001. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The state of the Central-West and the Cerrado: land of the colonial gold of Goiás Velho, of the hot springs of Caldas Novas and of the landscapes of the Chapada dos Veadeiros, one of Brazil's great natural sanctuaries.
Read the history of Goiás →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Legend has it that Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva threatened the Goiá people with setting a river on fire: he took out cane spirit, lit it in front of them and told them he would do the same to their waters if they did not reveal where the gold was. Terrified, the Goiá showed him the gold-bearing gravels of the Rio Vermelho. That is where his nickname comes from, Anhanguera —'old devil' in the indigenous language— and from that founding legend, true or not, comes the town that today is Cidade de Goiás.
The history of Cidade de Goiás begins to the rhythm of the gold rush that shook the Brazilian interior at the start of the 18th century. After the gold finds in Minas Gerais, expeditions of paulista bandeirantes pushed further and further west in search of new deposits. One of those expeditions, led by Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva —the same Anhanguera of the legend— reached the lands of present-day Goiás around 1722 and found gold on the banks of the Rio Vermelho.
Around those gold gravels a settlement known as Arraial de Sant'Ana appeared around 1727, quickly filling with miners, traders, enslaved Africans and adventurers drawn by the wealth. Gold mining, largely based on slave labor, gave rise to a hierarchical colonial society and to the building of the first churches and houses that still define the historic center.
In 1739 the arraial was raised to the status of a town under the name Vila Boa de Goiás, becoming the administrative center of the region. The prosperity of gold, however, would be relatively brief: the richest veins were exhausted over the course of the 18th century, but by then the town had already consolidated as the political and urban heart of Goiás.
With the creation of the captaincy of Goiás in 1748, separated from São Paulo, Vila Boa became its capital, the seat of the governor and of the colonial administration. By then gold was already declining, and the region's economy shifted toward cattle and subsistence farming, in a long period of relative isolation and stagnation that, paradoxically, helped keep the town's colonial architecture intact.
Through the 19th century, in an independent Brazil, the town took the name Cidade de Goiás and remained the capital of the province (and later the state) of Goiás. Government palaces were built, such as the Palácio Conde dos Arcos —the governors' residence since the 18th century, today a museum with period furniture and a collection of pieces that tell the story of the captaincy's administrative life— and the region's administrative, religious and cultural life carried on.
That same 19th century saw one of the most remarkable artistic expressions of the Brazilian interior flourish: the sacred art of José Joaquim da Veiga Valle (1806-1874), a self-taught sculptor born in Vila Boa itself, who carved dozens of religious images in polychrome wood for the churches of Goiás. His works, in a very personal late baroque style, are kept today at the Museu de Arte Sacra da Boa Morte and are considered one of the peaks of colonial art in Brazil's Central-West, comparable in regional importance to what Aleijadinho represented for Minas Gerais.
The town kept its role as capital for almost two centuries, which reinforced its historical identity and its rich heritage of churches, mansions and public buildings. That institutional continuity left a deep mark: Cidade de Goiás was not just a mining town but the seat of power for a vast region of the Brazilian interior, with a town council, a jail, a government palace and an intense religious life organized around several churches and brotherhoods.
The 20th century brought the most drastic change in the city's history. In the 1930s, as part of the modernization and inland-settlement policies driven by Getúlio Vargas's government and by state authorities, it was decided to build a new planned capital for Goiás. The argument was that the old capital, hemmed in between mountains, lacked room to grow and good communications.
That is how Goiânia was born, a city designed from scratch, officially inaugurated as the new state capital in 1937 (with the move consolidated over the following years). Cidade de Goiás then lost the capital status it had held for almost two centuries, and came to be popularly known as 'Goiás Velho' (old Goiás) to distinguish it from modern Goiânia.
Far from being a death sentence, moving the capital had an unexpected effect: left aside from rapid urban development, the town kept its colonial ensemble almost intact. That preservation would, decades later, be the basis of its heritage recognition. The loss of political power turned, in time, into the gain of an exceptional historical legacy.
International recognition came in 2001, when UNESCO inscribed the historic center of Cidade de Goiás on the World Heritage list. The organization valued the colonial urban ensemble as exceptional testimony to the occupation and colonization of central South America during the 18th and 19th centuries, highlighting the harmony between the architecture, the street layout and the surrounding landscape of the Serra Dourada. Unlike Ouro Preto or other more monumental mining towns, Goiás impresses through its humble, domestic scale: low houses, narrow streets and an intimate relationship with the cerrado landscape around it.
The cultural identity of Goiás is closely tied to the figure of Cora Coralina, the pen name of Ana Lins dos Guimarães Peixoto Bretas (1889-1985), a poet and confectioner born in the town, in the same house on the banks of the Rio Vermelho that is a museum today. Cora lived much of her life away from Goiás, raising children and making sweets for a living, and she only published her first book, 'Poemas dos Becos de Goiás e Estórias Mais', in 1965, when she was already 75. That late debut did not stop her from becoming one of the best-loved voices in Brazilian literature: her poetry, plain and deep, gathers everyday life, humble women, popular trades and the memory of the 'becos' (alleyways) of her home town. She died in 1985, shortly after being honored with an honorary doctorate from the Universidade Federal de Goiás.
The living culture of Goiás also shows in its religious traditions, chief among them the Procissão do Fogaréu during Holy Week. It takes place in the small hours of Holy Wednesday and stages the search for and capture of Christ: dozens of 'farricocos' —hooded figures in red or black robes and pointed hoods that completely conceal the face— walk the streets of the historic center carrying lit torches, while the town's electric lights are switched off to heighten the dramatic effect of the fire. The tradition, with Iberian and colonial roots, is passed down through generations of local families and is now recognized as intangible cultural heritage, drawing thousands of visitors every year. Added to its Goiás cooking —empadão, galinhada, rice with pequi—, its crafts and its serene atmosphere, these traditions make Cidade de Goiás a place where the colonial past is not only stone but a culture still alive, renewed every Holy Week.