Valparaíso de Goiás is 25 kilometers southwest of Brasília, on the plateau known as the Planalto Central. It belongs to what Brazilian planners call the Entorno do Distrito Federal - the capital's surround - a ring of satellite cities that grew up outside the federal boundaries to absorb the workers the master-planned city had never really intended to house within its superblocks. Valparaíso is a young place. The first census counted its inhabitants in 2000. By 2010 the population had grown by more than 25,000. The entire city lives in urban density; the municipality has no rural area at all. On highway BR-040, which runs north into Brasília, about 50,000 vehicles pass every day. Many of them are Valparaíso residents commuting the short distance into the capital for work.

Brasília was designed in the late 1950s by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer to be the most rationally planned capital in the world. What was never rationally planned was where the construction workers would live. The bus drivers, the cooks, the cleaners, the waiters, the security guards - the service economy of the capital had to settle somewhere, and the federal district was never going to admit them in quantity. Valparaíso, like Luziânia and Novo Gama and the other satellite cities, is where they went. In 1979 the first housing project opened with what the historical record politely calls precarious services - meaning not much water, not much sewer, and not much pavement. Four decades on, the city is cut by rail and highway. Furniture makers and logistics companies have settled in. About 40 percent of the economy still runs through the informal sector, but Valparaíso has moved from emergency housing to actual city.

The municipality borders the federal district to the north and the older municipality of Luziânia to the south. On the east sits Cidade Ocidental, on the west Novo Gama - all of them satellite cities in their own right, forming a contiguous ring of Brasília's commuter belt. BR-040 cuts through. So does BR-060, BR-020, BR-251, and the state highway DF-290. Brasília is 25 kilometers to the capital center; Goiânia, the state capital of Goiás, is 191 kilometers by highway through Anápolis. For most Valparaíso residents, it is Brasília that pulls - Goiânia is a weekend or an occasional errand. The city's center of gravity tilts against its own state's capital and toward the federal one, across an invisible line on a planalto.

Valparaíso scores better than most satellite cities on the measures that define a Brazilian municipality's human development. In 2007 there were no hospitals at all, which meant medical emergencies had to be driven across the border into Brasília. The infant mortality rate was 18.98 per thousand - well below the Brazilian national average of 33.0 at that date. The adult literacy rate was 93.1 percent, one of the highest in Goiás and well above the national 86.4. The Municipal Human Development Index of 0.795 ranked the city 12th of Goiás's 242 municipalities. These are the statistics of people who left somewhere poorer and came here to start over, and whose children are now teachers and clerks and small-business owners. The numbers describe a kind of progress that the original master plan for Brasília never accounted for.

The actual Valparaíso - the Chilean port city, pronounced Val-pa-rah-EE-so, whose name in Spanish means Valley of Paradise - sits on the Pacific coast, a city of hills and funiculars and painted houses, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2003. The Chilean engineer who worked on a housing project in central Brazil in the late 1970s could not have known that the name he casually applied would attach itself to a municipality of more than 150,000 people. Nor could he have known that by 2026, most residents of Brazilian Valparaíso would never have visited its namesake and some would not know the name came from Chile at all. This is how names travel: not carefully, not in ceremony, but by the small private choices of people who pass through a place.