🇧🇷 Brazil · North
Palmas is an oddity within Brazil: a state capital entirely planned and built from scratch in the late 20th century. Founded in 1989 when the state of Tocantins was created, it's the youngest capital in the country, a city of extremely wide avenues, blocks ordered by coordinates and a lot of open sky, raised on the banks of the Tocantins river, beside an enormous artificial lake. Its modern, geometric layout recalls, on a smaller scale, the planning spirit of Brasília.
But beyond its curious urban design, what puts Palmas on the traveller's map is its role as the gateway to the Jalapão, one of Brazil's great ecotourism destinations: a landscape of orange dunes, fervedouros of crystal-clear water, waterfalls and wild cerrado. Palmas is the logical base for flying in, stocking up and organising the expedition to that remote corner of the country.
The city also has its own quiet charm: freshwater beaches on the lake, wide sunsets over the water, regional cooking with river fish and the gentle heat of the interior. This guide covers the practical side of Palmas —how to get there, what to see, where to sleep and eat— treating it both as a destination in itself and as a springboard to the Jalapão.
Palmas is the youngest state capital in Brazil. It was born with the creation of the state of Tocantins, which the 1988 Constitution split off from northern Goiás to give autonomy to a historically neglected region. Since no existing city met the conditions to be the capital, the decision was made to build a new, planned one on a site chosen on the banks of the Tocantins river. The foundation stone was laid in 1989 and the city grew very fast in the following decades, with a modern layout of wide avenues and numbered blocks. Its name evokes the old district of São João da Palma, tied to the history of the region. Before it was founded, the territory of today's Tocantins had a long history linked to the 18th-century gold cycle (with settlements such as Natividade and Monte do Carmo) and to the struggle for the separation of northern Goiás. Today Palmas combines its character as a planned capital with its role as the gateway to the Jalapão. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The youngest state in Brazil, created in 1988: the former northern half of Goiás, settled by gold-seeking bandeirantes and carrying a long dream of autonomy that goes back to 1821. A land of Cerrado between two great rivers, with the planned capital of Palmas and the dunes, waterfalls and crystalline waters of Jalapão.
Read the history of Tocantins →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The history of Palmas makes no sense without the history of the territory that is now Tocantins. For centuries, this vast region of central-northern Brazil was the north of the state of Goiás: an enormous area, thinly populated, far from the Goiás capital and from the centres of power, which felt neglected and abandoned by the south of the state. Out of that feeling came, as early as the 19th century, a long-running desire for autonomy and separation.
The region did have a rich history, though. During the 18th-century gold cycle, the discovery of gold deposits gave rise to mining settlements such as Natividade, Monte do Carmo, Arraias and Porto Nacional, some with valuable colonial heritage that survives today. Once the gold ran out, the economy turned to cattle and farming, and the region was left relatively isolated and lagging behind.
Over time several movements emerged demanding a state of their own for northern Goiás. Figures such as Joaquim Teotônio Segurado, as early as the start of the 19th century, embodied those first autonomist impulses, which would resurface again and again. The dream of a state independent from northern Goiás took almost two centuries to come true, but it finally found its moment with the new Brazilian Constitution.
The old dream came true with the Federal Constitution of 1988, the 'citizens' Constitution' that sealed Brazil's return to democracy after the military dictatorship. That text, promulgated on 5 October 1988, created the state of Tocantins, definitively splitting off the north of the state of Goiás. A new unit of the federation was born, the youngest in Brazil, named after the great river that crosses it: the Tocantins.
The creation of the state answered underlying reasons: the enormous size and isolation of northern Goiás, the difficulty of administering it from the distant Goiás capital and the conviction that self-government would drive the development of a historically lagging region. The first governor, Siqueira Campos, was a key figure in the process of creating and organising the new state, and became the great driving force behind the construction of its capital.
One of the first and biggest challenges was precisely deciding where the capital would be. None of the existing cities —not Porto Nacional, not Araguaína, not Gurupi— on its own met the conditions and the consensus to lead the new state. The decision was as bold as the one taken for Brasília decades earlier: build a new capital, planned from scratch, on a site chosen on the banks of the Tocantins river.
Once the decision to build a new capital was made, a site was chosen on the banks of the Tocantins river, in an area of cerrado at the foot of the Serra do Lajeado, within the municipality of Porto Nacional. There, on 20 May 1989, the foundation stone of Palmas was laid, formally beginning the construction of the city. It was the first planned state capital in Brazil built after Brasília, and heir, in a way, to that same modernising spirit.
The name 'Palmas' recalls the old district of São João da Palma, tied to the history and the autonomist movements of the region. The city was designed with a planned layout of wide avenues, large blocks (the 'quadras') organised by a coordinate system and generous open space, conceived for a capital that would grow fast. At its heart the enormous Praça dos Girassóis was laid out, one of the largest urban squares in the country, ringed by the buildings of state power.
Palmas grew at a remarkable speed. From open ground in the cerrado it became, within a few decades, a city of hundreds of thousands, drawing migrants from all over Brazil who came to work in and populate the new capital. That fast growth gave it a young population and a rate of expansion few Brazilian cities have known in so little time.
Palmas shares with Brasília the status of a city planned and built from scratch to be a capital, but on a different scale and in a different era. Its layout, designed in the late 1980s, went for wide avenues, an orderly block system and a rational organisation of space, meant to take fast growth and a swelling number of cars.
The feature that most surprises visitors is the coordinate naming system: the 'quadras' are identified by a combination of letters and numbers indicating their position relative to the city's axes. This system, logical on paper, tends to disorient first-time arrivals until you learn to 'read' the code of the addresses. It's one of those traits that make Palmas a peculiar city within Brazil.
Like any planned city, Palmas has its bright and dark sides: openness and order sit alongside long distances, dependence on the car and the contrasts between the planned areas and the neighbourhoods that grew on the outskirts at the pace of migration. Even so, its modern urban design, its parks and its relationship with the lake and the sierra give it a look of its own, unlike any other capital in the Brazilian North.
In barely a few decades, Palmas went from a project on paper to a fully fledged capital, with universities, commerce, services and a cultural life of its own. Its young population, the result of the strong migration that filled it, gives it a particular energy, and its setting on the shore of the Tocantins river lake handed it freshwater beaches that became a mark of identity and a leisure space for its residents.
On the tourist map, though, the great magnet of the region isn't the city but its surroundings: the Jalapão, the extraordinary landscape of orange dunes, fervedouros, waterfalls and wild cerrado stretching across the east of the state. Palmas has established itself as the gateway to that destination, the place where travellers land, stock up and organise expeditions into one of the most astonishing ecotourism corners of Brazil.
So the youngest capital in the country combines two identities: that of a planned, modern city growing at dizzying speed, and that of an adventure base into the nature of Tocantins. That double condition —20th-century urban design and forest, dunes and crystal-clear rivers a few hours away— sums up the character of Palmas within contemporary Brazil.