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Costa's cross on the map became a skyline. Along the 820-ft.-wide "monumental axis" that runs for a mile and a half from the commercial center to the Plaza of the Three Powers, all the major government buildings are up. The residential axis, a six-lane, limited-access boulevard, has been paved, and 3,455 apartments are completed. Rising water in the 15-sq.-mi. artificial lake has already performed a slum-clearance job on hundreds of workers' shacks. Plans for the years ahead are drawn to the last detail: cemeteries will be built on either end of the residential zone "to avoid funeral processions through the center of town."
But Brasilia is still a raw clay construction site, with 600,000 newly transplanted trees and a few patches of turf. To handle what U.S. travel agents think will be a tourist boom, Brasilia has only one 180-room hotel, often jammed with 500 guests and feeding 1,000 at every meal. Pessimists still call Kubitschek's $4,000,000 Palace of the Dawn "the most beautiful summer home on earth," implying that Brazil will now have two capitals.
To the Frontier. For the next few years, government is certain to be split between the two cities. Embassy Row in Brasilia is mostly a row of cornerstones and stakes on the allotted sites, leading Kubitschek to threaten to "invite all the ambassadors to dinner in Brasilia once a week until they get tired of commuting from Rio" (a 2½-hour plane trip). But the first 3,000 bureaucrats, moving with many a grumble to Brasilia last week, knew they were there to stay. Both Candidate Lott and his rival, ex-São Paulo Governor Jánio Quadros, faced with an accomplished fact, pledge to carry on the Brasilia job.
For the new capital has caught the nation's imagination. Criticism has died away in pride. Full-blooded Indians from the Amazon, Negroes from Bahia, Japanese truck farmers from São Paulo are all streaming west in search of jobs and land. Throughout the vast plateau (altitude: 3,600 ft.) the climate is pleasant (average temperature: 69° F.), and the farm land, though not rich, will grow vegetables, rice, corn, coffee, tapioca, wheat and cattle.
Brasilia is also a personal monument to Kubitschek. "He hounded us all the time," says Pinheiro. "He created the spirit of Brasilia, and he got it built." This week, as Kubitschek flashes his broad grin across his El Dorado, not even the proud citizens of Rio, Brazil's seat of government since 1763, can begrudge him his day—though at the stroke of midnight they will be living in nothing more impressive than the capital of a newly created state called Guanabara.