Enio Pipino and Joao Pedro Moreira de Carvalho founded their company in 1948 to sell land in northwestern Paraná. It went well enough that by 1954 Pipino was expanding, founding new settlements across the state. By the early 1970s he had turned his attention to Mato Grosso, buying 198,000 hectares from Jorge Martins Phillip and advertising free or cheap land to anyone who would come. They came from everywhere - southerners first, then northerners, northeasterners, migrants from across Brazil. The construction pace drew comparisons to Brasilia a decade earlier. The difference was that Brasilia had been built by the federal government to a plan by Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa. Sinop was built by a real estate developer, and it looked like it. Wide streets, unpretentious houses, cattle on the edges of town.

What the settlers cut first was trees. Northern Mato Grosso was still broadleaf Amazon forest when Sinop was founded, and logging was the fastest way to clear land and produce cash. The industry boomed through the 1980s and 1990s, then peaked and contracted as the best stands were exhausted and environmental regulations tightened. What replaced it was agribusiness: soybeans, cotton, corn, rice. The Teles Pires River, a major tributary of the Tapajos, bounds the city - and the Tapajos flows into the Amazon, so technically Sinop sits within the Amazon Basin. The climate is equatorial, with 2,500 millimeters of annual rainfall concentrated in six intense wet months and a dry season hot enough to push daily temperatures past 40 degrees Celsius. Sinop hosts the only branch of Embrapa, Brazil's agricultural research agency, in all of Mato Grosso, and a Sivam radar monitors the surrounding forest.

A striking thing about Sinop is how quickly it became an intellectual center for the region. Four public and private universities now operate in the city - the Federal University of Mato Grosso, the state university UNEMAT, UNIC, and FASIPE - collectively enrolling students from every small town in northern Mato Grosso whose only realistic option for higher education is the drive to Sinop. More than 27,000 students were enrolled in the city's schools as of 2009, and the language academies - CNA, Fisk, Wizard - are present in the way they are in big Brazilian cities. For a place that did not exist when the moon landing happened, Sinop became the de facto capital of what locals call the Nortao, the Big North.

The city has an outsized sporting culture for its size. Rogério Ceni, the Sao Paulo FC goalkeeper who played more than 1,200 professional matches and scored 131 goals from the goalkeeper's position - still a world record - started his professional career at Sinop Futebol Clube before moving south. A memorial in town holds his gloves, his captain's awards, his Pauline Medal. Ceni's home club, Sinop Futebol Clube, plays in the Northern Giant Stadium - Gigantao - which seats 13,000. Santos and Sao Paulo have traveled the thousand-plus kilometers from the coast to play matches there. And for extreme sports fans, Sinop is also the hometown of freestyle motocross rider Gilmar Flores, known by his nickname Joaninha, the Ladybug. Not bad for a city whose streets were cut out of jungle within most of its residents' lifetimes.