From Colônia Cinco Mil to the forest
After Mestre Irineu's death, Sebastião Mota de Melo established his own Daime center at his home on the outskirts of Rio Branco, a settlement known as Colônia Cinco Mil. A masonry church was built there and the community grew as seekers arrived from across Brazil and abroad, with many members choosing to sell their possessions and pool resources — including livestock and savings — into a shared fund supporting communal work and provisioning.
By the late 1970s, concern over degraded farmland and pasture at Cinco Mil, together with Padrinho Sebastião's recollection of Mestre Irineu telling him his destiny lay in Amazonas state, led the community to use proceeds from selling land to buy a truck and search for a new site. An initial settlement on the Rio do Ouro, begun in April 1980, took more than two years of hard labor to establish before it had to be abandoned when Brazil's land agency, INCRA, determined the area belonged to an existing rubber estate.
Founding the village
INCRA directed the community instead to unclaimed land along the Igarapé Mapiá, between the municipalities of Boca do Acre and Pauini. On January 20, 1983, an advance party of about thirty men and four women reached the site, having hauled supplies overland after their truck became stuck roughly 20 miles from Boca do Acre. The settlement took shape where the Igarapé Mapiá splits into two branches, one of which was named Igarapé Repartição, and the community's name — Céu do Mapiá, or "Sky of the Mapiá" — is said to have come from Pedro Mota, one of Padrinho Sebastião's younger sons, echoing a naming pattern that later spread to Santo Daime churches founded elsewhere, including Céu do Mar in Rio de Janeiro, Céu da Montanha in Visconde de Mauá, and Céu do Planalto in Brasília.
Community life in the first years was organized communally under the direction of Padrinho Sebastião's son Alfredo Gregório de Melo, with residents building housing, a church, and a Casa de Feitio for preparing the sacrament, largely by hand with saw and machete before chainsaws reached the settlement. Céu do Mapiá today sits within a forest reserve and functions as an ongoing community whose institutions include the church body known as ICEFLU (formerly CEFLURIS), an environmental institute, and a residents' association.