The park protects the Sincorá Range, a north-south spine of eroded sandstone whose flat summits rise above 2,000 meters and catch the moisture coming off the distant Atlantic. The classic view from Morro do Pai Inácio looks out over an ocher plain studded with isolated mesas, each one a remnant of a plateau that weathered away everywhere else. The vegetation up top is strange and specific: rocky grasslands with twisted shrubs, endemic orchids hiding between stones, hummingbirds working the flowers. Below, rivers cut down through vertical walls and pool in canyons the color of strong tea, darkened by plant tannins. The park sits in the middle of the dry sertão, but because the cliffs force rising air to drop its rain, the plateau is a wet island in a thirsty landscape.

Most travelers arrive at Lençóis, a cobblestoned town of pastel houses that grew rich on diamonds in the nineteenth century and never quite lost its swagger. From Salvador, the overnight bus run by Real Expresso carries you across the flat cattle country before climbing into the hills. The other gateway, Vale do Capão, is quieter and closer to the best trailheads - a jeep from Palmeiras will drop you there for a handful of reais. Eat the godó de banana while you are here. The dish comes from the first prospectors who inhabited the region: green bananas stewed with whatever meat was handy (usually sausage, dried beef and bacon), tomatoes and onions, a high-calorie meal built by people who needed it after a day in the diggings. Like the town itself, it tastes of improvisation made permanent.

The best of the park is earned on foot. A four or five day trek through Vale do Capão and Vale do Pati is widely considered the finest hiking in Brazil, and the ranking is not idle. You sleep in the homes of the last families of the Pati, who stayed behind when commercial agriculture and mining were banned and who now host trekkers for a living - basic accommodations, kerosene lamps, strong coffee at dawn. Shorter walks reach Cachoeira do Sossego, where a river tumbles between boulders into a cold plunge pool. Further south, the Poço Encantado and Poço Azul are sinkhole caves filled with water so clear and so blue that when shafts of sunlight slide through the openings above between April and August, the pools appear to glow from within.

Water defines this place. Rivers carve the Lapa Doce and Pratinha cave systems through limestone beneath the sandstone caprock, widening chambers that dwarf the beams of your flashlight. Storms gather in the afternoons, especially in the wet months from November to March, and the cliffs catch the lightning. Flash floods can turn dry creek beds into fast water within minutes - local guides warn against camping close to rivers, and a few hikers have drowned over the years. The park remains formally incomplete: as of 2015 the administration had never been finalized, and no entrance fee is charged. It feels less like a ticketed attraction than a region - enormous, understaffed, largely informal, and all the more remarkable for it.