Araguari

About Araguari

Railways made Araguari. From the 1890s the Mogiana line and later the Estrada de Ferro Goiás met here, and for most of the 20th century the town was a busy junction where passengers and cargo changed trains between São Paulo and the interior of Goiás. By the 1930s it was already one of the few Brazilian towns with more than 40,000 inhabitants.

That railway past is still visible in the grand former passenger station, the Palácio dos Ferroviários, in the railwaymen's museum and in the tree-lined squares laid out in the station era. Today Araguari is a city of about 118,000 people in the Triângulo Mineiro, surrounded by coffee farms of the Cerrado Mineiro and irrigated vegetable fields.

It makes an easy, unhurried stop: an afternoon for the station buildings and squares, a walk in the shaded Bosque John Kennedy, and a trip out to the cerrado landscapes of the Pau Furado State Park on the Araguari River, which the city shares with Uberlândia.