Sobradinho, Brasília
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- This article is about the Brasília satellite city. There are an artificial lake, a dam and a city named Sobradinho in Bahia, which have no connection to this one.
Sobradinho is an Administrative Region (RA-V) of the Federal District of Brazil. It is grouped as a satellite city of the Brazilian capital, Brasília. The area is 569.37 km² and it is located 22.1 km. northeast of Brasília. The population was 157,577 in 2004.
The drainage area is made up of the watercourses that form the basins of the Maranhão River, which flows north to join the Tocantins and the São Bartolomeu River, which flows south to join the Corumbá, a tributary of the Paranaíba.
Sobradinho began with a ranch of that name belonging to the town of Formosa, Goiás. According to popular history the name came from the existence of an old cross of built long before 1850, along the banks of a stream near the ranch. On one of the arms of the cross were two little bird nests of a bird called joão de barro, one on top of the other, forming a little two storey house--a sobradinho in Portuguese. This phenomenon attracted the attention of passersby who took it as a reference point with the name Cross of Sobradinho or Sobradinho of the Cross. As time went by the local stream was called Sobradinho Stream.
Because of the need to house the migrant families from the Northeast, Goiás, Bahia and other states, Sobradinho was created along the old highway that linked the city of Planaltina, Goiás and the Federal Capital being built (1959). Today that old highway is a four-lane motorway and residents of Sobradinho can be in Brasília in a few minutes time.
