A lot has been written on this site about Brasilia so it is difficult to add something extra. In short, we just loved our short visit there. Brasilia is perhaps the world's largest example of urban planning - four years before it was built, there was nothing but an idea.

Perhaps no country was better suited to such a task than Brazil. First, the disproportions in the development of the coast and the interior of the country were huge then. Secondly, the most outstanding architects with the vision, knowledge and experience needed to implement such an ambitious project came from Brazil. It also seems that the country has had a climate that allows for the implementation of such bold, utopian assumptions.

I imagine the delight of Lucia Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Roberto Burle Marx and others - few architects in history have had such a great field to show off, being able to let their imagination run wild in an almost unlimited way.

The gentlemen did not stop at copying the solutions known earlier and created the city not even for their times, but for times that were yet to come (some people claim that they still had not come). The city was built on the plan of a flying condor or a plane, with residential districts located along the wings, and public buildings in the body. At the top of this corps - the head of a condor or the nose of the plane - there is the Three Authorities Square (Praça dos Três Poderes), with the seat of the Congress, the Presidential Palace and the Supreme Court building. The artificial lake of Paranoa and Brasilia National Park, a fragment of a real rainforest just a few kilometers from the center, were to be used for relaxation. In the city, everything had its order and plan, and residential districts were built in the same way. But the most important thing is that the city was built with car traffic in mind, forgetting about the needs of pedestrians - in the 1950s it was an extravagance or an expression of excessive optimism, because even today we know that transport cannot be based solely on car traffic.

As we came to Brasilia by car, we can confirm that the city is perfect for motorists. The only downside was the wide, but almost constantly jammed entrance alleys, where traffic was calmed down by dozens of speed cameras. Brasilia in general seems to confirm the claim that no matter how wide you build the streets, at some point they will get jammed.

You can also reach the city center via wide avenues without having to worry about parking - there are plenty of parking spaces inside. Suffice to say that by parking several times in different parts of the city, I not only found a spot quickly, but I did not even pay a single centavo for parking.

We started our tour from an unusual place, a great white pyramid that is the building of the Temple of Good Will (Templo da Boa Vontade), an ecumenical temple serving all religions. You are not allowed to wear shorts, but the nice guards provided long trousers and a skirt for free. The floor is arranged in the form of a snail, with black and white fields. Visitors are advised to walk around the black squares in a counterclockwise direction to the center and then return clockwise over the white squares. The place is an amazing conglomerate of major religions, and in the temple shop you can buy various amulets, crystals, but also accessories important for Muslim, Christian, Hindu and even ancient Egyptian deities.

The next temple we visited was not ecumenical, but due to its fame, many non-Christians certainly visited it. It is one of the most famous monuments in Brasilia - the Dom Bosco Sanctuary. It is said that the patron of the temple, St. John Bosco, at the end of the 19th century, had a dream in which he saw a great modern city… and the location might correspond to today's Brasilia. The prophecy turned out to be self-fulfilling - President Juscelino Kubitschek knew the prophecy of St. John Bosco and that is one of the reasons why he ordered Brasilia to be situated where it is now. And John Bosco patronizes an absolutely outstanding temple in the city of his dreams

After the Dom Bosco Sanctuary, it was time for the crème de la crème of our visit, Esplanada dos Ministerios and Praça dos Três Poderes. Unfortunately, these beautiful buildings were closed to visitors this time, so we could only admire them from the outside, usually parking on the extreme lane of the 8-lane esplanade. We had to cross it a few times as pedestrians, which was quite a difficult feat - we had a choice of either bending to the closest (read - at least half a kilometer away) lanes with lights, or counting on luck when changing the lights. It's not really a pedestrian city. But in all other respects it is delightful and has no equivalent elsewhere in the world.