Beberibe had a long, slow birth. The first colonial registration of the area dates to 1691, when a cluster of buildings was raised on a sesmaria - a royal land grant - held by four Portuguese settlers. The land sat largely unoccupied until the early 1800s, when Baltazar Ferreira do Vale of Cascavel and Pedro Queiroz Lima of Aquiraz bought farms there. A donation of land by Brasiliano Ferreira de Araújo for the construction of a church, inaugurated in 1875, pulled a town out of the farmland. The municipality was formally created in 1892, but its status flipped back and forth between municipality and district for another sixty years until 1951, when governor Raul Barbosa signed a law establishing Beberibe permanently. Even then, the official installation waited until 1955. Few places take two and a half centuries to become themselves.

The wealth of nineteenth-century Beberibe came from the engenhos - the sugar mills - that clustered along the rivers. Rapadura is a particularly stubborn form of sugar, unrefined and molasses-dark, traditionally sold in hard blocks that last for months. It was the currency of the Northeast interior, sweetening coffee in hundreds of small towns and feeding the cattle drovers crossing the sertão. The Cunha family and other regional dynasties grew prosperous off it. When the industry declined - bigger, more mechanized mills elsewhere, cheaper refined sugar on the world market - Beberibe's engenhos went bankrupt one after another. The name Vila Rica quietly stopped being accurate. What it left behind was a landscape of rural districts - Parajuru, Paripueira, Itapeim, Sucatinga, Serra do Félix - still named for the farming villages from which they grew.

Eighty kilometers southeast of Fortaleza, Beberibe sits on a coastline that tourism discovered later than most of northeastern Brazil but has since embraced fully. The beaches stretch for kilometers in each direction, punctuated by the multicolored sandstone cliffs that became the Beberibe Cliffs Natural Monument in 2004. Kitesurfers from Europe and Argentina arrive in the dry months, when the trade winds blow reliably and the flat water between the beach and the outer sandbar offers something close to ideal riding conditions. The local economy has quietly rebuilt itself around them. The pousadas that now line Praia das Fontes and Morro Branco occupy, in many cases, the same ridges where the engenho owners once built their country houses.

Inside the municipality, the 29,794-hectare Prainha do Canto Verde Extractive Reserve marks a different kind of victory. Created in 2009, the reserve was established specifically to protect a traditional fishing community - one that had spent years fighting off real estate speculators who wanted to convert their stretch of beach into another resort corridor. The speculators lost. The community still sails jangadas - the traditional flat wooden rafts with triangular sails that have defined Ceará's artisanal fishing for centuries - off the beach at dawn. It is a reminder that along this coast, the old economy and the new one do not always replace each other. Sometimes they just settle, warily, into adjacent plots of sand.

Before the sesmarias, before the Portuguese names on the paper, the indigenous peoples of this region knew the area as Uruanda. Brasiliano Ferreira de Araújo's farm, which eventually became the city's municipal headquarters, took its name from the Tupi word Beberibe - but the older name for the land itself lingered in local memory long enough to enter the written record. Uruanda. The detail is small but it matters: the place had a name before anyone brought sugar cane to grow here, before the mills and the saints and the tourists and the cliffs became an attraction. Those layers sit underneath the rest.