How long did it take to build Brasília?

Why the rush

President Juscelino Kubitschek’s term ended in January 1961. Since 1891, when Brazil’s Constitution first ordered a capital on the Central Plateau, every government had passed the job on to the next, and Kubitschek feared that without speed the move would never happen. So he bet on building enough to open the city before he left office, making the change impossible to undo. In September 1956 a law created Novacap, the state company that would build it, run until 1960 by the engineer Israel Pinheiro, an old ally from Minas Gerais. In October 1957 another law fixed the date of the move: April 21, 1960. From then on, every month counted.

Month by month

• Late 1956: work begins. For the president, a “palace of planks,” the Catetinho, goes up in ten days.
• March 16, 1957: the jury picks Lúcio Costa’s Pilot Plan for the city.
• October 1957: a law sets the move for April 21, 1960.
• June 1958: the first palace, Oscar Niemeyer’s Alvorada, the president’s residence, is finished.
• 1958: Taguatinga is founded to move shacks out of the Pilot Plan’s way.
• January 1959: days before the Belém-Brasília highway opens, its chief engineer, Bernardo Sayão, is killed when a branch falls on his tent.
• 1959: the Paranoá dam is closed and the lake begins to fill.
• April 21, 1960: the capital is inaugurated.

Day and night

The work never stopped: day and night, under floodlights. Kubitschek flew in and slept at the Catetinho. Even so, in early 1960 the city was still a building site, short of glass, asphalt and residents. Opening was not finishing. Much was left for later: the Cathedral, with its sixteen curved columns, was only inaugurated in 1970.

Not everything on the site was a race against the clock. At Carnival in 1959, workers of the Pacheco Fernandes building firm protested against spoiled food, and the Special Guard of Brasília came back at night and opened fire on their barracks. The official version speaks of one dead; two newspapers of the time said nine; witnesses heard decades later speak of dozens. The number was never established.

How many people built it?

The figure most often quoted is not a count of workers. A census in 1959 counted 64,000 people on the building site: the men who worked there, and also the families and the trade that followed them. Many lived far from the Pilot Plan, in places such as the Cidade Livre, the tax-free “Free Town” of 1956 that was meant to vanish after the inauguration and is now Núcleo Bandeirante. Most came from Brazil’s Northeast, from Goiás and from Minas Gerais, many of them on open-backed trucks after days on the road. The question of why the capital was moved at all is in Why did Brazil move its capital to Brasília?, and the plan they were building in Who designed Brasília?.