Truth and Rocket Science blogger, John Guidry, has been writing very interestingly about the Brazilian city, Brasília. There are now three posts on the subject, all worth reading. Guidry lived in Brazil for long periods of time while working on his doctoral thesis. He says that he considers Belém, the “cidade das mangueiras” at the mouth of the Amazon River, his second home town. 

"From 1956 to 1960, Brazilian architects, engineers and peasant laborers called candangos built
a new capital, Brasília.  This was the realization of a dream first
voiced in 1827, just 5 years after the country became independent, when
an advisor to Emporer Pedro I suggested that he move the capital from
the colonial city of Rio de Janeiro, on the coast, to a new city in the
interior.

"Brasília, as it eventually came to be called, was a Brazilian
version of Luso-Manifest Destiny.  The new city was built on the legacy
of the Bandeirantes, slave hunters and prospectors whose
journeys into the South American interior in the 16th and 17th
centuries extended Portuguese holdings – Brasil – at the expense of the
Spanish crown."

Read more at Truth and Rocket Science.