The first written records of the region come from the French naturalist Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, who passed through in 1819 and noted the abundance of tapirs. The local name for the place - Tapirs' Farm - reflects what settlers found when they came hunting the animal they were still allowed to hunt. Gold drovers had worked the region before them, but by then the easy gold had run out. The ones who stayed raised cattle. The chapel became a parish in 1873, the parish became a town in 1887 (de facto, a decade later, once the tax disputes with Pirenópolis subsided), and the town became a city in 1907. On January 9, 1924, Anápolis became the first place in Goiás to have electricity. The telegraph followed in 1926. The railroad arrived in 1935.

Geography did most of the heavy lifting. Anápolis sits on the plateau between Brasília and Goiânia - 140 kilometers from the federal capital, 54 from the state capital - on the BR-060 highway that became a four-lane motorway and the BR-153 Belém-Brasília route that begins here. That location turned the town into an obvious logistics center. The municipality sits at 1,017 meters elevation in tropical savanna climate, with winters dry enough that the mean July rainfall is four millimeters. The population hit 398,869 in the 2022 census, making it the third-largest city in Goiás. The DAIA industrial district, built in 1970, became the engine. Today it contains Laboratório Teuto Brasil, the country's biggest generic drug plant, along with dozens of other pharmaceutical, chemical, and logistics operations.

The Brazilian Air Force base at Anápolis - ALA 2 - houses one of the service's most important installations and a significant portion of the Amazon Surveillance System, SIVAM, which monitors airspace over the world's largest rainforest. The base protects the national capital 140 kilometers to the east. Meanwhile, across town, Hyundai's assembly plant produces the HB20 and Tucson for the Brazilian and South American markets. The federal government chose Anápolis to anchor a major national logistical center, tying together road, rail, and air. A Centro-Atlântica railroad branch of 685 kilometers runs through Goiás, and the city sits at the planned terminus of the north-south railway that will connect to the Port of Itaqui in Maranhão. The planned Expresso Pequi passenger rail between Brasília and Goiânia will stop here.

Anápolis had a gross domestic product of 13.3 billion reais in 2015, second largest in the state behind Goiânia. The city hosts Hyundai and Mabel (cookies) and Vepeza and the generic medicine dynasty at Teuto Brasil. It produces 90,332 automobiles and 13,542 pickups' worth of traffic on its streets as of 2011. But the agricultural base that built the place has not disappeared. The municipality still counts 65,000 head of beef cattle, 138,000 poultry, and substantial harvests of bananas, citrus, corn, and soybeans. Eighty-three hundred hectares of bananas yield 8,300 tons annually. Education anchors the rest: the State University of Goiás campus, UniEVANGÉLICA (a Protestant university and one of the state's first), and six other colleges serve thousands of students. The city ranks 16th of 242 Goiás municipalities on the human development index.

Footballer Luciano came from Anápolis. So did Derley. Henrique Meirelles - who served as president of the Central Bank of Brazil under Lula and Finance Minister under Temer - grew up here before becoming one of the most powerful economic policymakers of his generation. Racing driver Felipe Guimarães was born here. Paulo Bertran, economist and historian of central Brazil, came from the same plateau. For a city whose origin story revolves around a saint's statue and a stubborn mule, Anápolis has sent an unexpected share of its children into professions that demand precision: banking, economics, motorsport, professional football. The chapel Ana das Dores promised to build is long gone. The city that grew around its site has had better luck lasting.