In the 1970s, when Brasília was still new and the land west of the federal capital was mostly empty cerrado, a handful of farmers settled onto what the government called the Águas Claras Agricultural Colony. In 1989, Governor José Aparecido decided to expand the colony idea to adjacent lands, creating new colonies at Vicente Pires, Samambaia, and São José. About 360 farmers signed contracts to produce crops on small plots. The rent was low, the term was 30 years, and the idea was to create a belt of market gardens supplying the capital. Very quickly, things went another way. The farmers discovered they could subdivide their plots and sell them for housing at many times what agricultural rent would yield. By the 2000s, the colony was an informal suburb of tens of thousands. The government spent the next two decades trying to regularize what had already happened.

The official version says the name Vicente Pires came from a small stream that runs through the region, and that the stream in turn was named for an early settler - Vicente Pires da Mota - who owned land here. No one seems entirely sure when he lived or what he did. There is a little bit of everything in such names: a stream, a farmer, a stream named after the farmer, a colony named after the stream, an administrative region named after the colony, and finally a place whose residents, in 2010, held a contest among schoolchildren to pick the city's flag, coat of arms, and anthem. The winners were published in the Diário Oficial do Distrito Federal. Vicente Pires da Mota, whoever he was, now has an anthem to his memory, chosen by seventh graders.

Until May 26, 2009 - exactly 20 years after the first farms were established - Vicente Pires was legally part of Taguatinga, one of the original satellite cities of the federal district. On that date, Law 4327 made it an administrative region in its own right, with its own administrator, its own boundaries, its own budget. Taguatinga lies to the west; Águas Claras to the south; Guará to the southeast; Brasília proper to the north; Brazlândia to the northwest. The new region comprised the Vicente Pires Housing Sector, the Samambaia Housing Sector, the São José Housing Sector, and the Cana-do-Reino Housing Sector - the former agricultural colonies, now densely built up. Being an administrative region rather than a municipality means the region answers to the federal district government rather than to its own elected mayor, a distinctive arrangement that dates from Brasília's original design.

Vicente Pires sits at roughly 1,100 meters on the Brazilian Highlands, and the climate follows the cerrado pattern: a rainy season from October to April, a dry season from May to September. In the heart of the dry season, relative humidity drops below 30 percent, low enough that the federal district's public health authorities declare a state of alert and warn people with respiratory conditions to stay indoors. The dry air cracks skin, dries out eyes, and turns the grass pale yellow. Average temperature stays a mild 21.4 degrees Celsius year-round. Then October comes, the rains return, and the same flat cerrado that seemed to crumble in the dry season absorbs torrents that the region's roads were never built to handle. That is when the craters open.

Most of Vicente Pires was built without the kind of urban master planning that defined the rest of Brasília. Brasília's superblocks were laid out by Lúcio Costa in the 1950s. Vicente Pires was laid out by whoever happened to be selling lots that week. Power, public lighting, and asphalt eventually arrived. Water supply and proper sanitation are still in the implementation phase as of the mid-2020s. The main highways - EPCL, EPTG, and EPVP - give access to the region, but there is no rail and no metro; the buses run by Expresso São José are the only public transit. And still the place grows. For the families who live there, Vicente Pires is not an embarrassment. It is a city they made themselves, one lot at a time, in the shadow of a capital that never planned to include them.