Quixadá
"You turn a corner on the highway and there they are — boulders the size of apartment blocks, squatting on the plain like they own it."
I had been driving west from Fortaleza for about two hours when the monoliths appeared. They did not ease into view. One moment the landscape was flat scrub and the road ahead and the occasional roadside bar with painted walls advertising Antarctica beer, and then around a curve the monoliths were simply there — enormous rounded granite formations rising fifty, eighty, a hundred metres from the flat caatinga floor, their surfaces weathered smooth and their shapes so organic and massive that the eye keeps wanting to classify them as something else. Hills. Clouds. Buildings. But they are none of those things. They are just rock, very old rock, that refused to erode at the same rate as everything around it.
Quixadá has been a rock-climbing destination for serious climbers for decades — the granite faces offer multi-pitch routes with ratings up to 8a, and the climbing community here is small, dedicated, and generous with information. But you do not need to climb to experience the monoliths. Many of them can be walked around and, in some cases, walked up via natural ramps and gullies. The Serrote dos Três Irmãos — three brothers, three columns connected at the base — offers a trail to a saddle point with views across the entire basin. I reached it at four in the afternoon when the light was horizontal and orange, and stood there watching the shadows of the formations stretch east across the scrub for what must have been fifteen minutes without moving.
The town itself is worth more time than most people give it. The Açude Cedro, built in 1906 and one of the oldest dams in South America, sits just outside the centre and reflects the monolith behind it in a way that seems staged. The central market sells rapadura in blocks and sheets — the unrefined sugarcane product that sweetens everything in the Ceará sertão — and there is a culture of hang gliding here that brings people in from Fortaleza on weekends. I ate a plate of carne-de-sol with baião-de-dois, the rice-and-bean combination that is the regional staple, at a place with four tables and a television showing a São Paulo football match, and the owner, noticing I was not Brazilian, explained each ingredient with the careful pride of someone who knows their food is good and wants you to understand why.
When to go: June through October for dry weather and comfortable temperatures. Early mornings are best for photographing the monoliths before the heat makes the light flat and hazy. July brings the forró festival that fills the town. Hang gliding is best from August to November when thermal conditions are strongest.