Settlement began around 1960, when the highway toward Salvador was pushed through and a few families put down roots beside it. The municipality's own account names them: Raimundo Paz da Costa, Luís Ferreira de Castro, Boaventura da Silva Leite, who opened the first commercial establishment — a bar and grocery in one. The first buildings were adobe under palm thatch. A school opened in 1968 under a teacher named Terezinha de Barros Alves. For three decades that was essentially the whole place: a petrol pump, a handful of houses, and a stretch of asphalt with trucks on it, administratively a district of Formosa, 95 kilometres to the southeast. Then the land began selling.

What changed Vila Boa was not local ambition but arithmetic done a thousand kilometres away. Farmers from southern Brazil, priced out of land at home, discovered that the flat cerrado of northeastern Goiás could be had cheaply and — once limed and fertilised — could grow soybeans and carry cattle. They came, and the district grew fast. Vila Boa was made a district in 1988 and separated from Formosa entirely by state law 11,707 of 29 April 1992, taking up municipal government on the first day of 1993. By the middle of the following decade the numbers told the story plainly: 217 farms across 94,002 hectares, more than half of it natural pasture, 34,000 head of cattle, and 85 tractors doing the work that had recently been done by hand.

Growth on the land did not translate quickly into growth in the town, and the census figures from 2000 are worth reading as a description of lives rather than a scorecard. Adult literacy stood at 77.2 percent against a national average of 86.4 — meaning roughly one adult in four could not read the contracts, the fertiliser labels or the ballot. There was no higher education of any kind. A single hospital held thirteen beds. The Human Development Index came in at 0.674, ranking Vila Boa 226th of the 242 municipalities in Goiás. One indicator ran the other way: infant mortality, at 28.9 per thousand, sat below the national figure of 33.0. A new municipality gets to build its institutions from nothing, and Vila Boa was still doing that.

The municipality occupies the extreme northeastern limit of the Entorno do Distrito Federal, the ring of towns orbiting Brasília, though orbiting is generous at this distance. Formosa lies 95 kilometres to the southeast and shares the western and southern boundaries; Flores de Goiás takes the east and north. Goiânia, the state capital, is 365 kilometres away by a route that strings together seven different highways. Fewer than five people occupy each square kilometre. The 2022 census counted 4,215 residents, though the municipal government's own figures run higher. Beyond soy and cattle the economy runs on rice, coffee, sugarcane and corn, on small processing industries, and — as in a great many Brazilian interior towns — on public payrolls.

Why a municipality founded in the twentieth century took the name of the colonial capital is not something the local histories explain. Vila Boa simply means good village, a common enough hopeful phrase, and it is entirely possible the founders meant nothing more than that. The result, though, is a genuine trap for anyone searching records: Vila Boa de Goiás and Vila Boa, Goiás are separated by 250 years, 400 kilometres and everything else. One is a gold-rush capital of baroque churches and cobbled streets. The other is a soy town on a truck route, still assembling itself, still deciding what it wants to be.