Santa Maria began as a surveyors' camp. In 1797, a commission set out to draw the contested border between Spanish and Portuguese South America, and they pitched their tents on this spot, naming it the Acampamento de Santa Maria. The first peoples of the land were the Minuano and the Tape, who lived on the plains and in the hills before the European frontier closed in around them. In 1828, German mercenaries hired to fight in the Cisplatine War marched through; when the war ended, many simply stayed, and a wave of German settlement followed, later joined by Italians. Their descendants still give the city much of its character. Santa Maria became a town in 1857 and never looked back.

The thing that defines Santa Maria today is learning. The Federal University of Santa Maria, founded in 1960 by Jose Mariano da Rocha Filho, was one of the first federal universities planted outside a Brazilian state capital, and it transformed a railroad town into a city of campuses, hospitals, and research. Locals call their home the Cidade Universitaria, the University City, and the nickname fits. Tens of thousands of young people arrive each year to study, lending the place a restless, hopeful energy and a steady churn of new ideas. The Franciscan University, older still, traces its roots to 1951. Knowledge is the city's true industry.

Santa Maria carries a wound that the wider world came to know in a single terrible night. In the early hours of 27 January 2013, a fire broke out in the Kiss nightclub during a band's performance, ignited when pyrotechnics caught the acoustic foam on the ceiling. The club was packed, and there was no usable emergency exit. Two hundred and forty-two people died, most of them students in their teens and twenties, out for an ordinary night with friends. The grief reshaped the city and pushed Brazil to rewrite its fire-safety laws. Santa Maria has refused to let the dead become a statistic, and the memory of those young lives remains woven into the conscience of the place.

There is a softer rhythm here too. Each year the Romaria da Medianeira draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to honor Our Lady, one of the great Catholic festivals of southern Brazil. Because of its strategic position, the city also hosts a large military presence, including the Santa Maria air force base, and a tank factory that earned it the nickname Armored Capital. And beneath all of it lie the dinosaurs: Santa Maria is the birthplace of Brazilian paleontology, sitting atop some twenty Triassic fossil sites. Few cities ask you to hold so much at once, the sacred and the scholarly, the grieving and the ancient, all in the heart of Rio Grande.