Mossoró

Coming into Mossoró from the south, the salt flats appear before the city does. They spread out to the west of the highway in vast white planes, the evaporation pans catching the sun and throwing it back doubled, the edges of each pan edged with the pink of halophilic bacteria that turns salt production into something inadvertently beautiful. I pulled over and stood in the roadside heat looking at them for longer than was probably sensible. The white extended to the horizon in one direction and the city’s water towers appeared in the other, and for a moment the effect was almost abstract — a painting made of three colours: white, blue, rust-brown.

Mossoró produces roughly ninety-five percent of Brazil’s sea salt — the inland sea that once covered this basin left behind the deposits that industry now extracts — and the salt is visible everywhere in the city’s self-image. But what the city wants to talk about with equal enthusiasm is June 13, 1927, the day Lampião brought his cangaceiro band to rob the town and was repelled by armed citizens and local police. It is the only documented instance of Lampião failing to take a target. The city commemorates it annually with a theatrical re-enactment that fills the streets — the Chuva de Bala (Rain of Bullets), a sprawling open-air drama that has been running for decades and draws enormous crowds. Arriving during the off-season, I found the empty stage for the production still standing at the Praça da Resistência, its painted backdrops slightly faded, and liked it more that way.

The cultural life of Mossoró is richer than the regional tourism literature suggests. The Museu Municipal is serious about its collection of fossils — the Mossoró basin has yielded some significant dinosaur finds, including the Mirischia asymmetrica — and the Teatro Labareda is a genuinely interesting piece of folk-art architecture, its interior covered in panels depicting the cangaço era. The food runs to the expected northeastern staples with a particular local emphasis on charque — beef dried and salted, sometimes for days — and the sweet shops sell quebra-queixo, a jaw-testing molasses candy, in bags that make excellent gifts for people you slightly resent.

When to go: June for the Chuva de Bala festival, which is worth planning a trip around. Avoid December and January when temperatures peak above forty degrees. The salt flats have no bad season photographically, but the light in the late afternoon from May through August is exceptional.