The settlement began in 1857 as a single fazenda. The Neto family - specifically José Neto Cerqueira Leão Sobrinho - established a ranch near a stream flowing past a range of hills. The land was good: fertile enough for sugar cane, open enough for cattle. The founder gave the place a name that combined his devotion to Saint Louis - São Luís, the 13th-century King Louis IX of France - with the beauty of the surrounding ridges: São Luíz de Montes Belos, "Saint Louis of the Beautiful Hills." The spelling fluctuated for a century. Sometimes it was "Luiz" with a z, sometimes "Luís" with an s, sometimes without the accent on the i. The Secretariat of Planning (Seplan) eventually settled on "São Luis de Montes Belos" as the official version. For nearly a century after its founding the settlement grew slowly, as a rural district. In 1948 it was formally recognized as a district of Goiás, and in 1953 it became a municipality in its own right, with Deusdedit de Brito - known to everyone as Nenen de Brito - as its first mayor. He would serve the town as a representative for 28 years.

Cattle define the economy today, as they have for a century and a half. The municipal herd stood at 120,000 head in 2006, spread across a landscape that is mostly flat or gently hilly, with an average elevation of 630 meters. The main breeds are Gir and Nelore - both zebu cattle, descended from South Asian stock, chosen for their tolerance of heat, humidity, and the parasitic pressures of tropical pasture. The Gir is a reddish-brown dairy breed with a distinctive curved forehead, originally from Gujarat in India. The Nelore is a white beef breed from the Andhra Pradesh region, named for the Indian district where it originated. Brazil imported these breeds in the 19th and early 20th centuries because European cattle struggled in the cerrado. The experiment succeeded beyond anyone's expectations: today Brazil has the largest commercial cattle herd in the world, and its genetics are almost entirely zebu. São Luís de Montes Belos ships most of its cattle out to larger urban centers to be slaughtered. Two dairies operate in town. A Technological Milk Center - Centro Tecnológico do Leite - is under development to train technicians for the surrounding ranch country.

The town's other self-styled industry is furniture - which is where the "Industrial Capital" nickname comes from. Like much of western Goiás, São Luís de Montes Belos is forested in parts with valuable cerrado hardwoods, and small furniture workshops have long operated here, making tables, cabinets, chairs, and bed frames from local timber. The scale is modest - these are workshops, not factories - but they form a meaningful part of local employment, and for a rural Goiás town with 23,439 urban residents and 3,345 rural ones (2007 figures), even modest industry matters. Agriculture beyond cattle includes bananas on 425 hectares, hearts of palm, rice, and corn. The climate here is hot and semi-humid, with an average range of 27 to 28 degrees Celsius, a minimum around 19, and a maximum at the local weather station of 35. Rivers run through the municipality - the Fartura, the Cerrado, the São Domingos, the Santana, the Santa Rosa, the São Manoel, the Diamantina. None are famous. All of them feed cattle pasture.

The Universidade Estadual de Goiás operates a campus in São Luís de Montes Belos - the Faculdade de Educação, Ciências e Letras de São Luiz de Montes Belos, enrolling 763 students in 2004. This is not trivial for a town of fewer than 27,000 people. The campus provides teacher training and humanities education in a region where university access has historically been limited. The adult literacy rate in 2000 was 87.9 percent - slightly above the national average of 86.4, a notable achievement for a rural Goiás municipality. The town supports two hospitals with a combined 72 beds. The infant mortality rate in 2000 was 26.08, below the national average of 33. Its Human Development Index of 0.752 ranked it 71st out of 242 municipalities in Goiás, and 1,812th of 5,507 nationally - respectable, comfortably middle. The town does not dominate any national index. It simply functions - reasonably well, quietly, at the edge of the Goiás cerrado, 123 kilometers west of the state capital on highway GO-060.

The hills that José Neto Cerqueira Leão Sobrinho found beautiful in 1857 are still there, though the cattle have been traded out for zebu breeds from India, and the town that took his ranch's name has grown into a regional hub with universities and dairies and furniture workshops. Saint Louis - the crusading king, canonized for his role in the Seventh Crusade and his patronage of the sick - would make an unlikely patron for a cerrado cattle town. But 19th-century Portuguese settlers named their fazendas after whatever saint they felt close to, and often the names outlasted the saints' religious significance. What remains is the poetry of the name. São Luís de Montes Belos: Saint Louis of the Beautiful Hills. A cattle town in the cerrado, named by one man in 1857, still busy with the same fundamental economy. The nickname - industrial capital of the west - remains exaggerated. The founding name is quieter, and more accurate.