It started with one man and a plot of ground by the river. In 1775 Francisco Xavier de Medeiros, a Portuguese sergeant-major, began building a chapel to Saint Francis at the edge of the Canindé River. It took twenty-one years; the work was finished in 1796. In 1817, after the local community petitioned for it, Dom Frei Antônio de São José Bastos — then Bishop of Pernambuco, since Ceará had no diocese of its own — raised the chapel to the status of a parish church. The building still occupies that original site, though almost nothing of Medeiros's chapel is visible in what stands there now: the church was thoroughly reworked by the Italian architect Antonio Mazzoti and the painter George Kau. Canindé itself became a village in 1818 and was declared a municipality on 29 July 1846, with the city building installed downtown on 21 June the following year.

The feast of Saint Francis of Assisi falls on 4 October, and that date organises the whole calendar of Canindé. A week-long festival builds toward it, and on the day itself the great image known affectionately as São Francisquinho — little Saint Francis — is carried through the streets in procession. The figure that towers over the town, the enormous statue of Saint Francis that most visitors photograph first, was the major work of a local sculptor known as Mestre Bibi, who died in May 2022. Devotion here is not abstract or decorous. It is the specific devotion of people from a semi-arid landscape where rain is uncertain and illness can be ruinous, addressed to São Francisco das Chagas — Saint Francis of the Wounds — a figure defined by suffering borne rather than avoided.

The Museu Regional São Francisco holds more than 5,000 pieces, and it keeps growing, because pilgrims leave things behind. A romaria of this scale is built on the promessa: a bargain struck privately in a moment of desperation, and honoured afterward at whatever cost the walk demands. People come to Canindé because a child recovered, or a diagnosis was survived, or the rains arrived, or because they are still waiting and have decided to come anyway. The objects accumulate as a record of those transactions. It would be easy to read the crowd as spectacle — the aerial photographs certainly invite it — but every one of those 2.5 million arrivals represents an individual decision, usually made by someone with very little margin, to spend money and days they could not really spare in order to keep their end of a private agreement.

Strip away the basilica and the pilgrimage and Canindé is a working semi-arid municipality on land the Tapuia inhabited along the Curu and Choró rivers long before Portuguese colonisers began settling it in the seventeenth century. Temperatures run from 25 to 32 degrees Celsius. Soils are dominated by non-calcic types, at about 55 percent, with lithosols making up another 12.5 percent — thin ground, in other words, over rock. The fauna is what survives that: armadillos, lizards, sparrow-hawks, and the canindé bird that shares the town's name. Farmers grow cotton, bananas, corn and beans. Canindé is also one of the twelve municipalities inside the Environmental Protection Area of the Serra de Baturité, the first and largest protected area in Ceará at 32,690 hectares, where the land rises into a wet Atlantic-forest island above the scrub.

Religious tourism is the principal economic engine here, which makes Canindé an unusual case: a town whose main export is a place to arrive at. The permanent infrastructure reflects it — hotels, food stalls, workshops turning out devotional objects, a transport network sized for surges rather than steady flow. Alongside that runs an ordinary civic life. Three public high schools serve the municipality, named for Paulo Sarasate, Frei Policarpo, and the chaplain Frei Orlando, plus a private school, and the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Ceará maintains a campus here. Canindé ranks fifth among Ceará's municipalities by territorial extent and nineteenth by population — a large, thinly settled place that for one week each October becomes one of the most crowded pieces of ground in Brazil.