The bird is extinct now. Known to the Guanicuns people as the anicuns, it had feathers bright enough for ceremonial adornment and a song clear enough to imitate. The Guanicuns believed that eating the bird's tongue would give them its voice, so they ate the tongues and made ornaments from the plumage, and when the Portuguese arrived hunting gold in these river valleys, they eventually named a settlement for the species the original inhabitants had loved. Anicuns, central Goias, Brazil. The gold ran out long ago. The bird followed. Only the town remains, a community of fewer than 18,000 people on the right bank of the Rio dos Bois, still pronouncing the name of something no one has seen alive in generations.
The Portuguese came for alluvial gold in the streams, and they stayed when the gold ran out. By 1841 Anicuns was already a district of the municipality of Palmeiras. It became a municipality in its own right in 1911. In 1931 - for reasons the records do not fully explain, but which likely reflect an official desire to modernize - the name was changed to Novo Horizonte, New Horizon. The new name did not stick. In 1938 the town reverted to Anicuns, a decision that preserved a connection to the Guanicuns people and their bird even as both faded from the living world. In 1952 the district of Nazario, which had been part of Anicuns since 1933, separated to become its own municipality. Such administrative splits are common in Brazilian interior history - villages grow, pull away, find their own identities.
Anicuns does not have a dramatic economy. It has a diverse one. Six brickworks make bricks and tiles. Sixteen small shoe factories specialize in leather boots, the footwear of the cerrado cattle country. Dairy and beef cattle graze on the 33,000 hectares of natural pasture. There is a distillery, Anicuns S/A Alcool e Derivados, that uses the region's abundant sugarcane, and an industrial district that opened in June 2006. The 115,000 head of cattle outnumber the humans by a factor of six. Corn covers 4,200 hectares, sugarcane 7,000, rice 800, soybeans 400. Coffee, bananas - smaller plantings but present. What emerges is a picture of a place that learned not to depend on any single crop or industry, a lesson the gold boom taught three centuries ago.
Every year the Rio dos Bois becomes a stadium. The Copa Brasil de Canoagem - the Brazil Canoe Cup - runs for three days through Anicuns, accompanied by parades, cultural activities, and regional music. It is among the most important canoeing competitions in the country, which is not something most outsiders would expect from a town of 17,000. But rivers in interior Brazil are ancient highways, and the people who live along the Rio dos Bois have always known how to paddle. The event gives Anicuns something that a small town with modest infrastructure badly needs: a reason for the rest of Goias to pay attention. For three days in the season, the riverbanks fill. The rest of the year, the water runs past quieter. The Rio dos Bois is a tributary of the Paranaiba, itself a major feeder of the Parana, so in some technical sense a canoe launched at Anicuns could reach the Rio de la Plata.
The countryside around Anicuns has more scenery than its flat farmland suggests. Poco do Boi de Ouro - the Well of the Golden Ox - is a crater 30 meters deep that belongs to local legend as much as local geology. Serra do Felipe is used for hang gliding, catching the thermals that rise off the cerrado in late afternoon. Morro do Chapeu, the Hat Hill, is the highest point in the region. Morro de Monte Castelo, seven kilometers from the center of town, still wears native forest on its crown, a reminder of what the cerrado looked like before it became cattle and cane. Serra da Canjica, only three kilometers out, sits next to the Sao Jose Jica waterfall, where water drops more than 70 meters down a rocky wall. Cachoeira Sao Jose, closer still at two kilometers, offers rapids and smaller cascades - a place where farmers' children have cooled off for as long as anyone remembers.
Anicuns has shrunk. In 1980 it had 23,150 residents. By 2007 the population had fallen to 17,705. The negative growth rate of 0.13 percent is not dramatic, but it reflects a trend common to interior Goias: young people move to Goiania, which is only 86 kilometers away by the GO-060 highway, or further afield to Sao Paulo. The town remains. Its two districts are Capelinha and Choupana; its village is Poncionario; its single hamlet is Boa Vista. The Municipal Human Development Index of 0.720 places Anicuns at 173 of Goias's 242 municipalities - middle-table in a state where rural towns often struggle. What Anicuns has, besides its canoe championship and its shoe factories and its cattle, is a name that remembers something. Most Brazilian towns were named for saints or colonizers or rivers. This one was named for a bird and the people who loved its song.
Anicuns lies at 16.46°S, 49.96°W in central Goias, elevation 600 m. The nearest major airport is Santa Genoveva International (SBGO) in Goiania, 86 km east. Goiania itself is the state capital. Cruise at 4,500-6,500 feet to see the characteristic Goias landscape: rolling cerrado savanna converted largely to pasture, sugarcane, and maize, crossed by the Rio dos Bois flowing southwest to join the Paranaiba. The Serra Dourada rises nearby to the west. Tropical wet/dry climate (Aw): hot wet summers Oct-Apr, dry cooler winters May-Sep. Brasilia International (SBBR) is 280 km northeast. The town has no airport of its own; access is via highway GO-060.