Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva - called the Anhanguera, Old Devil, for a brandy-and-fire trick he pulled to frighten the Goyaz people into revealing their gold deposits - founded the Arraial de Sant'Anna here in 1727 at the foot of the Serra Dourada. The name of the region, Goyaz, was a tribute to those same Indigenous people. The gold came out of the Rio Vermelho fast enough to justify the Portuguese Crown establishing a Captaincy of Goyaz by 1748, with Vila Boa as its capital. Churches, chapels, foundry houses, and governor's residences went up through the 18th century. By 1761 the Museu das Bandeiras building was complete - today the Bandeiras Museum, among the oldest civic buildings in interior Brazil. The Casa da Fundicao from 1752, where raw gold was cast into official ingots and taxed, still stands. The 1790 church of Nossa Senhora d'Abadia preserves an altar painted in blue and gold.

By the early 19th century the easy placer gold was exhausted, and no deep-mining infrastructure emerged to replace it. The city turned to cattle and subsistence farming. A long, slow economic sleep began - which, paradoxically, is exactly what kept the colonial buildings standing. There was no demolition boom, no construction mania, no urgent need to replace 18th-century structures with 20th-century ones. The Colegio Sant'Ana, founded by Dominican friars in 1879, still functions. The Museum of Bandeiras preserves its 1761 shell. The Casa do Bispo - Bishop's House - survives. The Largo do Chafariz with its fountain, the Palacio do Conde dos Arcos, the Quartel do XX barracks, the narrow cobblestone streets, the red-tile roofs sloping toward interior courtyards - the whole 18th-century urban fabric came through intact because nothing better was built to replace it.

Ana Lins dos Guimaraes Peixoto Bretas was born in Goiás Velho in 1889 and spent most of her long life there - 96 years of it. She lived in a house dating from 1782, one of the oldest in town. She wrote poems starting at age 14 but did not publish her first collection until 1965, when she was 75. To support herself during the decades when her writing existed only in notebooks, she made and sold crystallized sweets - the candied fruits and preserves that Goiana households had prepared for generations. She called herself Cora Coralina, and she became, late in life, one of the most beloved Brazilian poets of the 20th century. Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote her letters. So did Jorge Amado, the great novelist of Bahia. Her house is now a museum containing her furniture, her documents, her correspondence, and above all the unmistakable voice of a small-town woman who had watched her city for most of a century and had something to say about it.

The Procession of the Fogareu happens on the Wednesday before Easter. At midnight, farricocos - men in long medieval robes and tall pointed hoods, faces completely covered - walk out of a darkened church carrying torches. Drums begin. The farricocos break into a run through the cobbled streets, re-enacting the Roman soldiers' search for Jesus. Torchlight flickering off stone walls, hooded runners moving at speed, the drums hammering at an unnatural hour of night - the spectacle is closer to medieval Spain than to modern Brazil, and indeed similar processions survive in Toledo and Sevilla. The only comparable tradition in Brazil is at Angra dos Reis. Originally only men could participate; that has changed. Old superstitions still attach to the night - the devil is loose, a werewolf walks, a headless mule canters through the streets. In 2006, according to the Goiania newspaper Diario da Manha, 10,000 tourists came to watch. In Goiás Velho itself, the ritual remembers itself on its own terms.

The municipality covers 3,108 square kilometers, much of it rugged terrain crossed by rivers - the Rio Vermelho, Uru, do Peixe, Ferreira, Indio. Part of the 26,626-hectare Serra Dourada State Park, created in 2003, falls within its boundaries. Waterfalls are accessible from the center of town: Cachoeira Grande, Santo Antonio, Balneario Bacalhau - each a swimming spot local families have used for generations. Annual events like FICA - the International Environmental Film and Video Festival - draw international attention. Tourism, cattle, and agriculture keep the local economy going. The cattle population is around 241,000 head; main agricultural products include bananas, oranges, hearts of palm, rice, corn, soybeans. The human population keeps drifting toward Goiania 148 kilometers away, or toward Brasilia 307 kilometers further east. The buildings that remained when the capital left still remain. UNESCO recognized them because history recognized them first - even if by accident.