Qualla: Raso da Catarina

Raso da Catarina: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adilson concerva, CC BY-SA 3.0. Rain does not linger here. The Raso da Catarina sits on a Cretaceous sandstone plateau weathered into sand so deep and so freely drained that a downpour is gone almost before it finishes falling — and for ten or eleven months of the year there is no downpour to lose. What all that erosion left behind is a maze. Canyons cut down into the tableland, isolated rock towers stand up from it like obelisks, and ravines run out into dead ends. This is difficult country to cross and excellent country to vanish into, which is very nearly the whole of its history.

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Image: Adilson concerva | CC BY-SA 3.0

Raso da Catarina: The Plateau That Drinks

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jailda Silver, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 Afon...

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Image: Jailda Silver | CC BY-SA 3.0

Raso da Catarina: Canudos

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 ...

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Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Raso da Catarina: The King of Cangaço

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fábio de Paina Nunes, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 i...

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Image: Fábio de Paina Nunes | CC BY-SA 4.0

Raso da Catarina: Pankararé Ground

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CesarCoelho667, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 count...

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Image: CesarCoelho667 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Raso da Catarina: What Still Hides Here

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Glauco Umbelino from Diamantina, Brasil, CC BY 2.0. 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. ...

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Image: Glauco Umbelino from Diamantina, Brasil | CC BY 2.0