Gilberto Duarte

Brazil's capital has three embassy clusters, and each one tells you roughly when that country showed up. When Lúcio Costa drew the plan for Brasília in 1957, he set aside two strips of land just for embassies, one in the south wing of the city and one in the north. The road that runs through them is called Avenida das Nações, the Avenue of Nations. Each lot is 25,000 square meters, about three and a half soccer fields. In January 1958, two years before the city opened, Brazil started giving these lots away for free. Within four months, 32 countries had claimed one. Most of them still kept their diplomats in Rio de Janeiro. The capital moved in 1960, but most foreign embassies stayed in Rio until the early 1970s. Brazil's own foreign ministry kept its headquarters in Rio until 1970, and the embassies moved right behind it. Germany moved in 1970, Britain in 1972 and the Philippines in 1973. The countries that picked first got the best lots in the south strip, with the United States, Britain, Japan, Italy and Argentina all on Avenida das Nações. Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway even sit side by side on the same block. The north strip is smaller and filled in later, with countries like Nigeria, Egypt, South Korea and the Philippines. The third cluster sits across the lake in Lago Sul, a neighborhood of big private houses. That is where many of the countries that came later set up, running their embassies out of homes instead of giant compounds. Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Timor-Leste, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates all work out of Lago Sul. None of those five countries was independent yet when Brasília opened in 1960. The UAE opened its embassy in 1991, and Kazakhstan waited until 2012. Cape Verde only got a law approving its own lot in 2024. Today more than 120 countries keep an embassy in Brasília, and the map of their flags reads like a timeline of Brazil's place in the world.