The core of the Raso da Catarina is roughly a rectangle: the São Francisco River along the north, the BR-110 highway to the east, the Vaza-Barris River to the south and the BR-116 to the west. That block covers about 5,000 square kilometres across the municipalities of Paulo Afonso, Jeremoabo, Canudos and Macururé, at an elevation around 600 metres. Defined more broadly as an ecoregion, following the natural limits of the Tucano-Jatobá sedimentary basin, it becomes a long north-south strip of 30,800 square kilometres reaching into Pernambuco.

The soils are the story. They are deep, acidic, excessively drained and close to infertile, and they produce a distinctive version of the caatinga — denser and less spiny than the thorn forest that grows on the crystalline rock elsewhere in the sertão. Branched bushes, cacti and bromeliads hold the ground. Full-size trees are rare. The Köppen classification is BSh, hot semi-arid, with rainfall so irregular that averages tell you almost nothing, and the daily temperature swing is severe: near 40 degrees Celsius in the afternoon, down toward 10 at night.

In the 1890s a wandering lay preacher named Antônio Conselheiro gathered thousands of the poorest people of the Bahian backlands into a settlement at Canudos, on the southern approaches to this country. They were sertanejos — smallholders, farmhands, the recently freed and their children — living communally under a religious authority the young Brazilian Republic read as rebellion.

Between 1896 and 1897 the Republic sent four military expeditions against them. Around thirty thousand people died before the settlement was destroyed, most of them the settlers themselves, including women and children killed in the final assault and its aftermath. It remains one of the deadliest episodes in Brazilian history. Much of what physically survived of Canudos now lies underwater, submerged by the reservoir of the Cocorobó Dam.

Forty years later the badlands sheltered someone else. Virgulino Ferreira da Silva, born near Serra Talhada in Pernambuco on 7 July 1897 and known to everyone as Lampião, led the largest and longest-lived of the cangaceiro bands — armed groups that moved across the northeastern interior in leather hats and embroidered gear, part outlaw, part private army, part symptom of a region run by drought, land concentration and hired guns.

The romance around him is enormous and the record is harder. His band ranged from a dozen men to a hundred, fought paramilitary police more than two hundred times, and once, near Serra Grande on 28 November 1926, held off 295 soldiers. It also took towns, extorted ransoms, tortured captives and killed on a scale credibly put in the hundreds and beyond. The police flying squads sent after him were not gentler. Maria Bonita joined him in 1930; their daughter Expedita was born in 1932 and raised by his brother.

The end came about ninety kilometres east of here, at the Angicos farm in Poço Redondo, Sergipe. At daybreak on 28 July 1938 police under João Bezerra opened up with machine guns. Lampião, Maria Bonita and nine others were killed, and their heads were cut off, exhibited publicly at Piranhas in Alagoas and sent on to Salvador, where they stayed on museum display for more than thirty years before finally being buried in the Quintas cemetery in 1969. Within two years of Angicos, the cangaço was finished.

The Raso da Catarina is not empty and never has been. The Pankararé people live in its northern reaches, on lands designated as the Brejo do Burgo and Pankararé Indigenous areas, on the borders of the municipalities of Glória and Nova Glória in Bahia. Health service records counted 1,648 Pankararé in 2014.

Their territory overlaps the northern part of what is now a strict federal nature reserve, which makes the Pankararé both residents of the caatinga and parties to every argument about how it should be governed. The plants and water of this plateau are not an abstraction to them.

On 11 October 2001 Brazil created the Raso da Catarina Ecological Station, 104,842 hectares in the municipalities of Rodelas, Paulo Afonso and Jeremoabo, protected at the strictest level the IUCN recognises and managed by the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation. The adjoining Serra Branca / Raso da Catarina Environmental Protection Area, 67,234 hectares, was created the same year, and in May 2006 both were folded into the Caatinga Ecological Corridor.

Six focal species justify the protection. The most celebrated is Lear's macaw, a deep cobalt parrot that nests in these sandstone cliffs and lives essentially nowhere else. The list also carries the three-banded armadillo, the white-browed guan, the yellow-faced siskin, the pectoral antwren and the cougar. The canyons that once hid fugitives now hide the last of an endemic fauna, which is a strange kind of continuity but a real one.