Brasília

Everything follows from Costa's diagram. The Eixo Monumental is a straight ceremonial axis, exceptionally wide, along which the institutional buildings are spaced and which terminates in the Praça dos Três Poderes. Crossing it is the Eixo Rodoviário, a gently curved axis carrying the residential wings north and south — which is why the city is commonly described as resembling a bird or an aeroplane in plan, though Costa himself described it simply as the sign of the cross adapted to the terrain. Where the two meet sits the central bus station and the commercial sectors. Function is separated deliberately: institutional here, residential there, commercial in defined sectors, hotels in their own blocks. That separation is what makes the city legible from above and demanding at ground level.

The residential superblock is the part of Brasília most worth understanding, and the part visitors most often skip. Each superquadra holds apartment buildings capped at six storeys, raised on pilotis so the ground plane runs continuously beneath them, set among trees rather than along streets, and screened from the axis by planting. Four superquadras form a neighbourhood unit sharing a school, a church, a cinema and a commercial strip, the intention being that ordinary daily needs are met on foot without crossing a fast road. Walk into one — SQS 308, with its chapel and its open ground, is the usual example — and the city's ambition becomes concrete in a way no monument conveys. Whether it succeeded is a fair argument; that it is a serious idea is not.

In the residential wings there are essentially no street names, and this is not an oversight. An address is a code that locates you precisely: a sector abbreviation, a block number, a building and an apartment. SQS 308 Bloco C reads as superquadra sul 308, building C; a commercial address in the same area starts CLS rather than SQS. The numbering is systematic — the first digit of the block relates to its distance from the central axis, the last to its position along it — so a resident hearing an address knows roughly where it is without a map. For a visitor, the practical upshot is to trust the code exactly as given, since asking for a street will get you nowhere and mapping apps handle the format better than people expect.

The individual buildings reward slow looking. The Cathedral is the one to see first: sixteen curved concrete columns rising to a crown, entered down a dark ramp so that you emerge into a flood of blue and green glass, with bronze angels suspended overhead. The National Congress pairs twin towers with two shallow domes, one convex and one a bowl, set at the end of the monumental axis. The Itamaraty Palace, the foreign ministry, is the connoisseur's favourite — an arcaded box standing in a reflecting pool with a garden by Burle Marx inside. Add the Planalto and Alvorada palaces for their thin, splayed columns, and the Santuário Dom Bosco, which is not by Niemeyer but whose walls of blue glass are the finest interior light in the city.

Lake Paranoá was made as part of the plan, to raise humidity and to give the city a shoreline, and it is where Brasília goes when it is not working. The Ponte JK crosses it in three asymmetric steel arches that leap alternately across the deck, easily the most photographed structure here after the Cathedral. Along the shore, the Pontão do Lago Sul is a strip of restaurants and bars built for the sunset, which in the dry season is genuinely spectacular — the air is so clear and the horizon so wide that the whole sky changes colour. The lake also supports sailing and paddling clubs, and the Ermida Dom Bosco chapel on the far shore is the classic vantage back towards the city.

Nobody's family has been in Brasília for more than a few generations, because the city is younger than that — it was populated by people who came from everywhere else in Brazil to build and then to run it. The food follows: this is one of the easiest places in the country to eat the regional cuisines side by side, with north-eastern cooking especially well represented. The commercial strips of the superquadras hold the everyday restaurants, the ones locals actually use, while the lakeside and the hotel sectors carry the formal end. Look out for pequi, a strongly aromatic regional fruit used with chicken and rice in the cooking of the surrounding cerrado — the local flavour that is genuinely of this plateau and not imported with a migrant.

Brasília's airport is one of Brazil's main hubs, so many visitors pass through it anyway on the way between coastal cities — which makes a deliberate stopover of a day or two easy to arrange. On the ground, accept that this is a car city: taxis and ride apps are the practical way to move between sectors, distances along the axes are long, and pedestrian routes are frequently indirect. Hiring a driver or a guide for a half-day of architecture is common and sensible. The climate has two modes rather than four seasons: a wet season from roughly October to April with heavy afternoon storms, and a dry season from May to September when humidity can fall dramatically low — drink far more water than you think you need and expect static shocks and dry skin.