Centro-Oeste

The Centro-Oeste — the cerrado interior. Opened by bandeirante slavers and an 18th-century gold rush, it stayed an almost empty frontier until two 20th-century transformations: the building of Brasília as a planned modernist capital (Niemeyer and Costa) in 1960, and the post-1970s conquest of the cerrado for mechanised soy and cattle. That fusion — the federal bureaucracy beside the world's fastest-growing agribusiness, with the Pantanal wetland alongside — makes it Brazil's fastest-growing farm region and sets it apart from the historic coastal cores.

• Existed: 1722 CE – present
• Type: Entity