It began without a wall, without a stage and without money. In 1951 a marketer named Epaminondas Mendonça decided that the streets of Fazenda Nova — a rural district of Brejo da Madre de Deus, some 180 kilometres from Recife — would serve as the setting for a reenactment of the death and resurrection of Christ. Passion plays were an old European form. Mendonça wanted one for his own community, performed during Holy Week by the people who actually lived there, and the street version ran from 1951 through 1962. It worked well enough to attract someone with larger ambitions. Plínio Pacheco arrived in 1956, and rather than improve the procession he proposed replacing it with a permanent city built for the purpose. Construction started that year. It took twelve.

What Pacheco finished in 1968 covers roughly 100,000 square metres — about a third of the area Jerusalem itself occupied in Jesus's time, by the theatre's own reckoning. It is regularly described as the largest open-air theatre in the world, a claim that is hard to audit and easy to believe once you have seen the wall. The nine stages are not stages in the proscenium sense; they are places. The first is the desert and the Sermon on the Mount. The second is the Temple. Then come the Upper Room, the garden at Gethsemane, Herod's palace, the Roman forum, the Via Sacra, Calvary and finally the sepulchre. The audience moves between them on foot, which means the production's pacing is partly a question of how fast a crowd can walk.

The cast is a mixture that would be difficult to assemble anywhere else. Actors known nationally from Rede Globo take principal roles alongside regional performers and a large body of extras drawn mostly from Pernambuco — around five hundred participants in all. The 2022 edition, the first full staging after the pandemic, listed more than 450 actors before counting extras and technical crew. Performances run each evening of Holy Week and have done so, with interruptions, since 1968; well over three million people have watched one. In recent years the production has added live streaming and virtual tours, which is a peculiar thing to do to a piece of theatre whose entire premise is that you get up and walk it yourself, and also the only way most Brazilians will ever see it.

Pacheco directed Nova Jerusalém until his death in 2002. Set that against the year he arrived and the arithmetic is worth sitting with: forty-six years attached to a single production in a single rural district, twelve of them spent laying stone before a word was spoken on the finished site. He was not building a set. He was building a place that would outlast the run, and it has. Between Easters the wall holds nothing in and nothing out. Cattle country resumes on both sides of it, the lakes sit flat, and seventy towers look out over scrub that has no interest in being Judea.

About two kilometres from the theatre, the Parque das Esculturas Nilo Coelho spreads across seventy hectares of open ground and granite. The figures carved there are northeastern rather than biblical — types and traditions of the sertão rendered in stone, some of them seven metres tall. Unlike the theatre, the park keeps no liturgical calendar; it is simply open, year-round, a second monumental gesture in a district that already contains one. Taken together they suggest the impulse behind Nova Jerusalém was never purely devotional. Somebody out here wanted to build at scale, and kept finding reasons to.