The land belonged in 1848 to Marinho Falcão, who sold it to Amaro da Silva Valente. Valente's son-in-law, Manoel André Correia, worked his way into the forest until he came out on a fertile plain full of leafy trees, and rested beneath one of them on the bank of a stream called Riacho Seco. He built a hut there. Other families followed, and a village gathered around the tree — an arapiraca, which is the name the place took, though the Tupi scholar Eduardo de Almeida Navarro traces the word instead to arupare'aka. Manoel André's wife died in 1855, and in 1864 he raised the chapel of Nossa Senhora do Bom Conselho over her grave. In 1880 Esperidião Rodrigues opened the first business house in the village, and in 1884 he started the first fair.

For most of the nineteenth century Arapiraca was somebody else's district, passed in turn between Penedo, Porto Real do Colégio, São Brás and Limoeiro de Anadia. Emancipation came on 30 October 1924, and the new municipality was assembled out of territory taken from five of them at once — Palmeira dos Índios, Porto Real, São Brás, Traipu and Limoeiro de Anadia. That gave it an odd geographical logic: Arapiraca sits almost exactly in the middle of Alagoas, on a broad plain at 264 metres, about 125 kilometres west of Maceió, with no natural rival nearby. Its zone of direct commercial influence now reaches something like half a million people.

Tobacco arrived as the answer to a landscape that could not reliably support much else. This is the agreste, the transitional belt between the humid coastal cane country and the dry sertão, and the fields around Arapiraca took to the crop. Through the 1970s it dominated the local economy and the culture with it — the smell of curing leaf, the buying agents, the sheds. Overproduction did the rest. Prices declined, the processing capacity backed up, and the cycle turned down through the following decade. From the 1980s onward the city rebuilt around trade and services instead, with the traditional feira livre — the descendant of Esperidião Rodrigues's 1884 fair — at the centre of it.

The rebuild worked better than anyone had reason to expect. In 2015 Arapiraca created 2,076 formal jobs, which made it the fourth-largest generator of registered employment of any municipality in Brazil — behind only Canaã dos Carajás in Pará, Pontal do Paraná, and Matão in São Paulo, all of them riding specific industrial or mining booms. Arapiraca was doing it with shops, services and a growing industrial sector. The 2022 census counted 234,696 residents, second in Alagoas only to Maceió and ninth among interior cities across the whole Northeast, in a municipality of about 346 square kilometres of which 59 are urban.

The climate is one of the state's kinder ones: an annual mean around 24.8°C and roughly 611 millimetres of rain, most of it falling between April and July, often with thunder and hard gusts. The automatic weather station installed on 26 April 2008 has recorded a low of 15.1°C on 17 July 2017 and a high of 39.8°C on 26 November 2015, with 100.3 millimetres of rain in a single day on 10 June 2009. The rest of the local calendar belongs to football. ASA, founded on 25 September 1952, and Cruzeiro de Arapiraca, founded on 28 May 2019, both play at the Estádio Municipal Coaracy da Mata Fonseca — opened in 1953, capacity 15,000, and known to everyone as the Fumeirão.