Nicolau da Silva Nunes was born in the Parish of Moutamorta in Tras-os-Montes, the mountainous northeastern corner of Portugal, and emigrated to Brazil in search of opportunity. He was living in Sales de Oliveira when he read a newspaper article describing fertile land in northwestern Sao Paulo state. He traveled out to see it and was struck by the exuberance of the forests and the clarity of the streams. He bought 400 bushels of land in 1911 - enough for himself and two partners, Antonio Goncalves Torres and Afonso Garcia Franco - and began selling lots to settlers. The only obstacle, as he saw it, was his neighbors: the Coroado people, the Crowned Indians, whose ancestral territory this was. Contemporary accounts report that Silva Nunes used trickery to hide the evidence of Indigenous presence from his customers - erasing trails, staging demonstrations of security - in order to keep his land sales moving. The dispossession was part of the founding. The forests he admired belonged to people he concealed from view.

The first house in Birigui was built of mud, at the confluence of what are now Silvares and Founders' Streets. Dona Antonia Real Dias was the first woman to live there, arriving with her husband Francisco Galindo de Castro. Lucas Scarpin, Antonio Simoes, Faustino Segura, Ricardo Del Nery, Joao Galo, France Contel, Giuzeppe Fonzar - the surnames read like a small immigrant atlas, Portuguese and Italian and Spanish families drawn by the same promise that had drawn Silva Nunes. In 1912, a bandeirante captain named Jose Cordeiro arrived with his expedition from Lencois Paulista and joined the settlement. Manuel Bento da Cruz founded the Sao Paulo Company of Lands, Timber and Colonization, with Roberto Clark and James Mellor as his pioneers. The town grew quickly. Coffee plantations pressed against the cerrado in every direction, and by 1921, only ten years after its founding, Birigui won administrative emancipation from its parent municipality. Archibald Thomas Clark took office as the first mayor in March 1922.

For most of the twentieth century, Birigui was a small agricultural town - cattle, coffee, later cotton and sugarcane. What changed its trajectory was an industry concentration that grew organically in the mid-century: children's footwear. Small shops opened, specialized, connected with suppliers, and by the 1980s Birigui had become the leading center of children's shoe production in Brazil. The 2006 figures are telling: 159 factories producing 57 million pairs of children's shoes in a single year, generating over 800 million reais in revenue. Eighteen thousand workers were employed in the sector - sixty percent of all jobs in the municipality. The industry has faced the same pressures that have hollowed out manufacturing elsewhere - cheap imports from Asia, rising labor costs, the pull of agribusiness - but Birigui has held onto its niche. The city's annual Brazilian Children's Footwear Fair still draws buyers from across the country.

If Birigui has a sporting innovation, it is biribol - a game invented in the city by a teacher named Dario Miguel Pedro. Biribol is volleyball played in a swimming pool, two teams of two facing off across a net, volleying a ball back and forth without letting it hit the water. It has spread across Brazil and found a modest international following, but its heart is here, where it was invented. The city's football club, Bandeirante Esporte Clube, was founded on March 11, 1923, with Jose Troncoso as its first president. In 1987 the team played in the top division of the Campeonato Paulista, the premier league of Sao Paulo state. More recently, the city produced Tabatha Ricci, a fighter who made it to the UFC, and volleyball player Victor Cardoso. Birigui now has 124,883 inhabitants spread across 530 square kilometers - a solid mid-sized paulista city, running its factories, playing its aquatic volleyball, descended from a railway clearing named for a biting fly.