The Sertão is the dry heart of Brazil's Northeast - a semi-arid plateau where the Caatinga biome holds on against ferocious drought and brief, violent rain. Through this landscape the inselbergs of Quixadá rise like leftover evidence. They are the same kind of formation that produces Stone Mountain in Georgia or Uluru in Australia: harder igneous rock that resisted while the surrounding substrate weathered away. At Quixadá the effect is concentrated. Dozens of domes rise across a landscape that is otherwise nearly flat, each one a geological survivor.

Cave paintings and other archaeological remains date human presence in these inselbergs to prehistoric times. The National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN) holds overlapping responsibility for the monument because of these sites, which remain little-explored. The paintings link the monoliths to the human story of the sertão - a region whose indigenous Kanindé and Jenipapo peoples lived here until conflicts with Portuguese settlers in the 18th century led to their destruction. The rocks outlasted both the peoples who painted them and the ones who displaced them.

At the base of Pedra da Galinha Choca sits one of the oldest large dams in Brazil: the Barragem do Cedro, the Cedar Dam, built between 1890 and 1906 of stone masonry, cement, and steel. The dam was a response to the devastating droughts of the late 19th century that drove whole populations off the land. On 30 January 2015 it was placed on Brazil's tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage nominations. The dam's silhouette, set against the 300-meter silhouette of the Brooding Hen, is a defining image of Ceará - industrial engineering and deep geological time framed in a single view.

The natural monument is a fully protected conservation unit under IUCN category III. The rules are explicit: no one may remove, dismantle, or deface the rock formations or install equipment on them. Civil works, earthworks, and new roads are prohibited where they would cause substantial ecological change. The state environmental agency Semace manages the unit. The pressures are real - deforestation, burning, and illegal mining for construction stone all threaten the surrounding Caatinga. But the inselbergs themselves, too massive to quarry easily and too dramatic to lose, are probably safe. They have outlasted mountains. They will outlast us.