The town was emancipated on 15 March 1893, in the first wave of municipal reorganisation after Brazil became a republic, and for the next half-century it was an unremarkable agreste settlement — a parish church from 1810, a city hall from 1909, a jail from 1911, and chalets along Avenida Joaquim Didier for whoever had money. Then the BR-232 opened in 1950. Recife was suddenly eighty-four kilometres away rather than a serious journey, and the calculation shifted for everyone in the capital who wanted a weekend somewhere else. Second homes went up on the slopes. Hotels and pousadas followed the second homes. Around 86,500 people now live in the municipality's 513 square kilometres, and a good share of the houses on its edges belong to people who are not among them.

The name is Tupi. Karawatã means, roughly, the scrub that pierces — a reference to the bromeliads that once grew thick across these hills, low and spiny-leaved, relatives of the caroá whose fibre the interior spun and of the pineapple the region still grows. It is a plant name for a plant place. Gravatá farms what the altitude permits: cut flowers, strawberries, pineapples, with the hill village of Russinhas given over almost entirely to pineapple. Rainfall averages only about 563 millimetres a year, which is not a great deal. What the town sells was never rain. It was elevation, and the fifteen degrees of difference that elevation buys on a July night.

The Alto do Cruzeiro lookout is reached by a staircase locals call the Escadaria da Felicidade, and at the top stands a Christ the Redeemer — smaller than Rio's, watching over a far smaller city, and no less the town's fixed point for it. Below, the old railway station has become the Estação do Artesão, a crafts centre; the 1911 jail is now the Memorial da Cidade. Gravatá has a habit of handing its institutional buildings over to culture, which is a modest and faintly comic form of civic confidence. The Matriz de Sant'Anna dates from 1810. Sixteen kilometres out, in the district of Uruçu-Mirim, the Caranguejo sugar plantation survives from the era when the coast's economy still reached this far inland.

The serras around town — das Ruças, das Cãibras, da Estrela, do Maroto — do the actual work of tourism here. Fourteen railway tunnels run through the Serra das Ruças, relics of the British-built line that once climbed the escarpment, and the nineteenth-century Cascavel rail bridge still stands and now serves rappellers. Climbers work Pedra Branca, a seventy-five-metre face, and Pedra do Tao, where orchids grow in the cracks; the Pernambuco Orchid Centre at Recanto Baraúna collects what the hills produce. There are waterfalls at Cachoeira da Palmeira and natural pools at the Balneário de Dona Nadir. Trails run out from half a dozen farms. For a town whose reputation rests on cool evenings and melted cheese, Gravatá turns out to be surprisingly vertical.

Two festivals anchor the year. In May, pilgrims walk from the Matriz de Sant'Anna out to the Riacho do Mel chapel, where local tradition holds that Frei Damião celebrated his first mass in Brazil — the Italian Capuchin friar who became one of the most venerated figures in the northeast. Late June brings São João, and Gravatá does what every agreste town does in June: forró until late, bonfires, corn in every conceivable form, and a population swollen with visitors. Caruaru, fifty-four kilometres further west along the same highway, throws the far bigger party. Gravatá's compensating advantage is that when the music finally stops, the night up here is cold enough to want a blanket.