The short answer
On April 21, 1960. Brasília was inaugurated at midnight that day, with a Mass on the Three Powers Square, and replaced Rio de Janeiro as Brazil’s capital. Building had begun in late 1956. The date was chosen on purpose: it is the anniversary of the 1792 execution of Tiradentes, whose fellow conspirators had dreamed of an inland capital.
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Born at midnight
Brasília’s birthday is a precise moment: midnight on April 21, 1960. On the Praça dos Três Poderes, the Three Powers Square, a crowd heard Mass before an iron cross brought from the cathedral of Braga, in Portugal. Tradition says it is the same cross that stood at the first Mass ever said in Brazil, by the Franciscan friar Henrique de Coimbra on April 26, 1500. A city drawn from a cross was getting another one. President Juscelino Kubitschek could not hold back his tears. In the morning the three branches of government settled into the new city, and Rio de Janeiro, the capital for almost two centuries, became a former capital.
Why April 21
The date was chosen on purpose. April 21 is Tiradentes Day, a national holiday. On that date in 1792 Tiradentes, an army ensign whose nickname means “tooth-puller,” was hanged in Rio de Janeiro, the only man executed for the Inconfidência Mineira, a plot to make Minas Gerais a republic free of Portugal. Those conspirators had planned to put their capital at São João del-Rei, far from the sea. Opening the inland capital on his day, under a president who was also from Minas Gerais, tied it to the oldest version of the dream. The holiday’s own history is in What is Tiradentes Day?, and the execution in How did Tiradentes die?.
A date written into law
The day was fixed long before the city existed.
In compliance with the […] Transitional Constitutional Provisions, the Capital of the Union shall be moved, on 21 April 1960, to the new Federal District already delimited on the central plateau of the Country.
When the law passed, less than three years remained and almost nothing stood on the plateau. Even in early 1960 the city was still a building site, short of glass, asphalt and residents. Many civil servants in Rio did not want to move, and some bet the date would slip. Kubitschek would not postpone it by a single day. How that race was run is in How long did it take to build Brasília?.
The party, and the people who built it
There were parades, speeches, fireworks and a ball. Convoys arrived from all over Brazil, and crowd estimates run from 100,000 to 300,000 people. In the crowd stood bricklayers who had reached the plateau years before on open-backed trucks, the migrant workers Brazilians call candangos. They watched the party of the city they had raised in about 41 months. Many did not move into it. They went home to the satellite towns at the edge of the Federal District, such as Taguatinga, founded in 1958.
Brasília still celebrates its birthday on April 21, so the capital’s anniversary and Tiradentes Day fall together every year.
Sources
- Law no. 3,273 of October 1, 1957, art. 1
- Juscelino Kubitschek, Por que construí Brasília (1975)