Teresina

Teresina was Brazil's first planned state capital — founded in 1852, designed from scratch on the confluence of the Parnaiba and Poti rivers, named after Empress Teresa Cristina. The planning was supposed to represent progress. Teresina replaced Oeiras as the capital of Piaui specifically because the old capital was too remote and too underdeveloped to govern effectively. A century and a half later, Teresina produces 40% of Piaui's GDP while 80% of the state's population faces food insecurity. The planned city succeeded. The state it was planned to rescue did not.

The geographic isolation is the structural explanation. Teresina is the only inland capital in northeastern Brazil, sitting 366 kilometres from the Atlantic coast. Every other northeastern state capital — Salvador, Recife, Fortaleza, Sao Luis, Joao Pessoa, Maceio, Aracaju, Natal — has direct port access. Teresina's distance from the coast meant it never developed export infrastructure, which meant it never attracted the foreign investment that transformed coastal capitals, which meant its economy remained service-oriented and domestically focused. The city generates 60% of its GDP from services, 27% from industry, and 13% from agriculture.

The heat compounds the isolation. Teresina is the hottest city in Brazil. The combination of equatorial latitude, inland position, and limited elevation produces temperatures that constrain outdoor labour productivity for months of the year — an energy tax that coastal cities with ocean-moderated climates do not pay.

Piaui's agricultural economy tells the source-sink story most clearly. The state exports essential oils, soybeans, cotton, cashews, crustaceans, and leather — commodities whose value is captured at the point of sale, not the point of production. Teresina functions as the administrative and service hub through which these commodity flows are coordinated, extracting a percentage of rural output in the form of government salaries, financial services, and commercial margins. The 40% GDP concentration in a single city within a state of three million people is not a sign of Teresina's strength. It is a sign of the hinterland's weakness.

The planned capital pattern recurs across the developing world: Brasilia, Abuja, Naypyidaw, Dodoma. Governments build administrative centres expecting them to radiate development outward. Instead, the capital attracts resources inward — the best-educated workers, the health infrastructure, the commercial activity — while the surrounding territory remains at subsistence levels. Teresina is the oldest example of this pattern in Brazil, and the evidence after 170 years is unambiguous: planning a capital does not plan an economy.