Everything changed in the 1970s. A family named Pereira da Silva - modest tailors by trade - moved to Jaraguá and began stitching clothing for local markets. Their workshop multiplied into another, then another. Neighbors learned the trade. Buyers arrived from São Paulo and the south to take stock, and by the turn of the 21st century the town had become what locals claim is the national capital of the clothing industry, with over 400 small factories producing garments sold across Brazil. It's a strange trajectory - gold to cotton, altars to sewing machines - but it made Jaraguá unusually entrepreneurial for an interior city its size.

Geography helped. Jaraguá sits on BR-153, the Belém-Brasília highway, the great road that ties the Amazonian north to the federal capital and onward to the coast. When the federal government completed the BR-153 in the 1960s, it pulled the entire Vale do São Patrício out of agricultural isolation and onto the national economy. Jaraguá is 124 kilometers from Goiânia, 230 from Brasília, and 90 from Anápolis, the second-largest city of Goiás. Trucks loaded with garments roll south daily. The municipal boundaries touch Goianésia, Itaguari, Itaguaru, Jesúpolis, Pirenópolis, Rianápolis, Santa Isabel, Santa Rosa de Goiás, São Francisco de Goiás, Taquaral de Goiás, and Uruana.

The clothing factories don't cover the whole economy. Jaraguá runs one of the largest cattle herds in Goiás - 176,000 head in 2007 - along with 32,000 milking cows feeding the dairy industry. The municipality is the state's biggest producer of pineapples, most of which head to São Paulo, and also grows watermelon, corn, rice, and beans across 129,000 hectares of farmland. The 2006 agricultural census counted 1,534 farms, 1,302 hectares of permanent crops including pineapple, coconut, and citrus, and nearly 94,000 hectares of natural pasture. Banking and retail keep pace: 442 industrial establishments, 339 retail units, and six national banks have offices in town.

The 18th-century religious architecture still defines the old center. Nossa Senhora da Penha, the 1748 church built atop the hill where the flood-weary settlers resettled, gave the town its official name - Nossa Senhora da Penha de Jaraguá - when it was made a vila in 1833. Nossa Senhora do Rosário followed in 1776 and Nossa Senhora da Conceição in 1828. In 1882 the vila broke free from Pirenópolis to become its own municipality. The original gold and silver altars disappeared over the centuries, but the churches stand, and Rua Direita still runs straight through the old town, as the Portuguese settlers laid it out.

Jaraguá's story is unusual because most colonial gold towns in Brazil either shrank into ghosts when the metal gave out or froze into picturesque museum-pieces like nearby Pirenópolis and the old capital at Goiás. Jaraguá kept moving. The first settlers left behind their riverside village when the floods became unbearable. The gold miners left behind their industry when the veins ran thin. The ranchers shared the land with the sewing shops. The Pereira da Silvas turned needles into an export sector. By 2007 the population had reached 38,968 across 1,888 square kilometers, with a literacy rate of 86.6 percent. The churches still ring the hours in a town that found a way to stay useful after every century tried to make it obsolete.