Chapada do Araripe

Santana do Cariri sits under a plateau that used to be a lagoon. Two and a half kilometres out of town at Sítio Canabrava, limestone concretions come up out of the Romualdo rock, and what is folded inside them is around a hundred and ten million years old. At least twenty-one species of pterosaur and twenty-two of fish have been named from that single site.

The Geopark Araripe runs across six municipalities in southern Ceará, Crato, Juazeiro do Norte, Barbalha, Missão Velha, Nova Olinda and Santana do Cariri, and eleven of its geosites are open to visitors. It sits inside the Araripe Sedimentary Basin, more than nine thousand square kilometres of it, laid down as Pangaea came apart into Africa and South America, which is why the fossil beds record a lagoon with occasional contact with the sea. The plateau is where the caatinga meets the cerrado, and the Floresta Nacional do Araripe-Apodi holds more than 38,000 hectares of that meeting, along with the Araripe manakin, a bird found nowhere else. The other half of the geopark is human: the Colina do Horto geosite in Juazeiro do Norte carries the Padre Cícero museum, and the Memorial do Homem Kariri holds the archaeology and rock art of the people the valley is named for. The fossils are worth stealing, which is its own measure of them, and French customs seized 998 at Le Havre in 2013 and sent them back here.