Luziânia sits 68 kilometers south of Brasília - close enough that when the federal capital exploded into existence in 1960 and spent the following decades absorbing migrants faster than it could house them, Luziânia became one of the relief valves. Rapid growth through the 1980s and 1990s brought the population from 92,817 in 1980 to over 190,000 today. The city is part of what the Brazilian government formally calls the Entorno do Distrito Federal - the ring of Goiás municipalities orbiting the capital. In 1996 the population briefly hit 246,000, then dropped when new municipalities like Valparaíso de Goiás and Cidade Ocidental were carved out of Luziânia's territory. The population has kept growing inside its reduced borders.

The Corumbá passes just west of the urban center, and the city's relationship with it is complicated. The river provides water for irrigation, for industry, and for the landscape - and in return, the city's untreated sewage flows into it, polluting the Corumbá seriously by the time it leaves the municipality. The river feeds into the Paranaíba basin further downstream, eventually joining the Paraná. For farmers, the Corumbá is a gift. For the ecology, it has been an ongoing casualty of the city's rapid growth outpacing its infrastructure.

The 2006 agricultural census tells the scale. Soybeans covered 40,000 hectares - the dominant crop. Beans took 24,000 hectares, corn 15,000, cotton 1,334, rice 1,000. The cattle herd counted 187,000 head. Poultry, even more remarkable, ran to 1,227,000 birds. Tomatoes, passion fruit, and guava filled in the fruit economy - Luziânia is the top guava producer in Goiás and fourth in tomatoes and passion fruit. The total area under some kind of agricultural use was nearly 217,000 hectares, spread across 1,767 farms, with 6,100 people directly dependent on farming. Semi-precious stones, gravel, and bricks add to the economy, as does a well-known local sweet made from quince.

Beneath the surface, the municipality is rich in gold and rock crystals. Above it, hardwood forests - jatobá, aroeira, peroba, angico - once covered much of the land but have shrunk as agribusiness expanded. What's left clings mostly to the river banks, forming narrow ribbons of forest along the Corumbá and its tributaries. The remaining stands are biologically valuable beyond their timber: they host birds, mammals, and insects that can't survive in the pasture and soybean fields around them. Preservation efforts are uneven, and the seasonal fires that sweep the cerrado make any surviving forest pocket progressively more vulnerable.

By 2007, the school system had 108 schools, 51,799 students, and 1,603 teachers. Two institutions of higher learning operated in town: the private FIPLAC (Faculdades Integradas do Planalto Central) and a campus of UEG, the state university. Literacy had reached 89.2 percent. Infant mortality was 21.11 per 1,000 live births in 2000, well below both state and national averages. In a competitiveness study by Seplan, the Goiás state planning secretariat, Luziânia ranked seventh among all municipalities in the state - a signal that the post-1980s economic transformation had given the old town real economic muscle. Brig. Araripe Macedo Airport serves the city for small-aircraft traffic; larger flights use Brasília. The old colonial town still sits at the center, but what extends around it is a modern agro-industrial municipality that the 1960 Brasília planners probably never imagined their capital would spawn.