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A Capital Built in 41 Months

1. Brasília was built from nothing in 41 months.

Construction began in 1956 on an empty plateau in Goiás, 1,100 metres up in the cerrado, hundreds of kilometres from any major city. The capital was inaugurated on 21 April 1960.

Three years and five months.

2. Around 60,000 workers built it, working around the clock.

They were called candangos, and many had migrated from Brazil's impoverished northeast. A state company, Novacap, was created specifically to run the project. Trucks, tractors, drills and thousands of tonnes of concrete and steel were hauled to a site with no infrastructure of any kind.

President Juscelino Kubitschek had campaigned on the slogan fifty years of progress in five. He got a capital city in less than four.

3. In 1987 it became the youngest city ever placed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Twenty-seven years after it opened. The listing protects Lúcio Costa's Pilot Plan, which he had submitted to the 1957 competition almost as a sketch — and which five of the six jurors chose anyway. Oscar Niemeyer designed the public buildings; he was 52 at the time and went on working until his death at 104.

One correction worth making: the plan is universally described as an aeroplane seen from above. Costa said it was a cross — two intersecting axes, a Monumental Axis and a Residential Axis. The aeroplane is what everyone else saw in it.

4. And the whole country now sets its clocks by it.

Brazil's official national time is Horário de Brasília — Brasília Time — and it is the reference against which the country's other zones are defined. Brazil spans four time zones; the one everything is measured from is named after a city that did not exist in 1955.

The clock: Brasília sits at about 48° west, on UTC−3, calculated for the 45th meridian. That leaves the city roughly twelve minutes behind its own solar noon. Brazil abolished daylight saving in 2019, so the figure no longer moves at all.

So: a country whose national time standard is named after a place that was scrubland within living memory, built by 60,000 people in 41 months, and protected as heritage before its first residents had retired.

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