Caatinga

I drove into the Caatinga for the first time on a cracked federal highway between Petrolina and Juazeiro, the caatingueira scrub pressing up against the tarmac on both sides, everything grey and silver and skeletal. It was August. The dry season had been going for months. The mandacaru cacti stood eight metres tall against a sky so blue it felt computational. I pulled over, got out, and stood there for a long time. I had been expecting desert. What I found was something far weirder — a forest that had not died but simply postponed itself.

The Caatinga covers nearly a million square kilometres across nine states in Brazil’s northeast, making it the largest dry tropical forest in the world. Almost none of the people I have met in São Paulo or Rio have ever been there. It exists in the Brazilian imagination primarily as a place of drought, poverty, and the great migrations — the retirantes immortalised by Graciliano Ramos and João Cabral de Melo Neto. That literary weight is real and should not be brushed aside. But it is not the whole story. The biome itself is extraordinary: home to 178 endemic species of plants, the peba armadillo, the preá guinea pig, and the catingueiro deer. After the first November rains, within days, the grey sticks explode into green and the air fills with the smell of wet earth and jurema flowers. I have seen photographs of this transformation. I have not yet been lucky enough to witness it in person. That is why I am going back.

The towns anchor the experience in ways the landscape alone cannot. In Canudos — where António Conselheiro built his millenarian settlement and was destroyed by the Brazilian army in 1897 — the old ruins are partially submerged beneath a reservoir, visible in the dry season when the water drops. It is one of the most quietly devastating historical sites I have visited anywhere. Further north, Juazeiro do Norte in Ceará is a city of pilgrimage, its streets thick with vendors selling plaster saints and cordel literature — the illustrated pamphlets that are the northeast’s oral tradition made portable. And in the backlands around Ouricuri and Serra Talhada, the food is the food of necessity turned into culture: sarapatel, buchada de bode, queijo de coalho grilled over charcoal, rapadura dissolved in black coffee. It tastes like a place that has learned to extract everything from very little.

When to go: November to January, the start of the rainy season, if you want to see the Caatinga green. March to September for cleaner roads and more accessible terrain — and for the stargazing, which in the far interior of Piauí and Pernambuco is among the best on earth.

What most guides get wrong: They describe the Caatinga as a wasteland between places. It is not. It is the place.