Church president Thomas S. Monson announced the temple on October 3, 2009, during the faith's semiannual general conference. At that moment, the Latter-day Saint community in Brazil had been growing for decades, and Ceará alone could not sustain easy temple attendance; the nearest temple at the time was a long journey south. Groundbreaking took place on November 15, 2011, presided over by David A. Bednar of the church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Then the design had to change. Then came the slow work of sourcing local granite, shaping the interiors, and cultivating the grounds across from FANOR University. When doors finally opened for a public tour in the spring of 2019, approximately sixty thousand visitors walked through.

On June 2, 2019, Ulisses Soares dedicated the temple in three sessions. Soares, a Brazilian by birth and a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, presided in Portuguese. It was the first time in the church's history that an entire temple dedication was conducted in a language other than English. The moment carried weight for Latter-day Saints in Brazil, a country where the faith has grown from a handful of early converts in the twentieth century to more than a million members across hundreds of congregations. The Fortaleza temple is the seventh built in Brazil and the first in Ceará, and the first converts in the region had waited decades for a temple of their own to visit.

The architects chose a neoclassical vocabulary softened with local materials. The white granite is native to Ceará, quarried from deposits that have supplied Brazilian buildings for generations. Floral detailing inspired by Brazilian orchids runs through the ornamental work, tying the structure to its tropical setting. The ten-acre site holds more than the temple itself: an arrival center, a meetinghouse for regular Sunday worship, housing for missionaries serving in the region, and a maintenance building complete the complex. The sloping ground gives the temple something unusual in Fortaleza's flat coastal city: a natural platform that raises the building above the surrounding neighborhood, letting it catch the Atlantic light from mid-morning through late afternoon.

Inside, the building is arranged for the specific rites that Latter-day Saint temples are built to host. There are two ordinance rooms, where ceremonies for members in good standing take place, and two sealing rooms, where marriages are performed in the theology of the faith. A baptistry supports proxy baptisms, a practice central to the church's understanding of family ties extending across generations. The temple is not open to the public after dedication; admission requires a recommend issued by local leaders to practicing members. A president and matron oversee the temple for three-year terms, handling both administrative work and training of the volunteer staff. Francisco J. da Silva and Maria E. da Silva took up those duties in 2024.

The temple sits at a particular address in a particular neighborhood, but it also sits at an intersection of local planning and global religious organization. When Fortaleza's building code forced the redesign, the story could have become one of friction. Instead, it became one of accommodation: a global institution accepting the judgment of a city authority and producing a better-proportioned building as a result. The single dome now reads more naturally against the low-rise Atlantic skyline than the original twin towers would have. From the observation decks of passing flights into Pinto Martins Airport, the white granite catches sunlight like a small lighthouse inland from the dunes, legible even when Fortaleza's own coastline drops below the horizon.