The town started, as sertão towns tend to, around a chapel. It was raised somewhere between 1789 and 1790, dedicated to Nossa Senhora da Penha, and built by enslaved workers at the direction of Filadelfa Nunes de Magalhães — a detail worth holding onto, because the labour that founded most of these settlements is usually the part that goes unrecorded. The name Vila Bela attached to a cattle ranch belonging to the Portuguese settler Agostinho Nunes de Magalhães. Provincial Law 280 made it a vila on 6 May 1851, with Manoel Pereira da Silva presiding over the first council; state law raised it to a city in 1909. The 1939 rename stuck completely. Ask anyone in Pernambuco about Vila Bela today and you will mostly get a blank look — unless they know the cangaço, in which case they will know exactly which town you mean.

What happened to the Ferreira family is documented, and it is not complicated. They were farmers locked into a feud with neighbours, the kind of dispute that the sertão's weak law and strong clans turned lethal with some regularity. On 18 May 1921, police killed Virgulino's father, José Ferreira. Virgulino went into the cangaço and did not come out. He rode first with the bandit leader Sebastião Pereira, took over what was left of the band in 1922, and for sixteen years led up to a hundred armed men across seven northeastern states — extortion, kidnapping, raids on towns and estates, running battles with state police forces that could not catch him. The nickname is said to come from his rifle work: he could fire a lever-action so fast that at night it looked like he was holding a lamp.

It ended on 28 July 1938 at the Angicos farm in Poço Redondo, Sergipe, where a paramilitary police column under João Bezerra caught the band sleeping. Lampião died there, along with Maria Bonita — who had joined him in 1930 and whose partnership with him gave the story the outlaw-couple gloss it has carried ever since — and nine others. Around forty cangaceiros escaped. The eleven dead were beheaded, and the heads went to Salvador to be examined by physicians looking for the criminal skull that the racial science of the period assured them was there. Then the heads were put on public display at Piranhas. They stayed on exhibit until 1969 — thirty-one years — before finally being buried at the Quintas cemetery. Lampião and Maria Bonita had a daughter, Expedita, born in 1932 and raised by his brother João. She grew up with a name that meant something in every town in the Northeast.

The cangaço left Serra Talhada something besides notoriety. Xaxado is a dance from this sertão, worked up in the second decade of the twentieth century and spread across the Northeast by Lampião and his band, who danced it to mark their victories. Men line up single file or in a ring, step sideways with the right foot and drag the left after it, and the rifle butts come down on the ground to keep time. The name is simply the noise: xa-xa-xa, the sound of sandals scraping dirt. It is recognised today as Brazilian cultural heritage, and Serra Talhada calls itself the capital of it, with a Festival de Xaxado and a Museu do Cangaço in town. A dance invented by armed men on the run has become a thing that schoolchildren learn.

None of which is what Serra Talhada actually does for a living. Around 92,000 people live here across 2,980 square kilometres of caatinga at an altitude of 429 metres, 415 kilometres from Recife, in a semi-arid climate that averages 25 degrees and 686 millimetres of rain concentrated into January through April. The Pajeú runs through it. The municipality was named a priority area when the Caatinga Ecological Corridor was established in 2006. It is the second most important city in the Pernambuco sertão after Petrolina, a hub for health care, education and commerce for a wide stretch of dry country. On Sunday afternoons the argument that matters is not about the cangaço but about the derby between Ferroviário and Serrano at the Pereirão, a stadium that holds five thousand people in a city of ninety thousand — which is, in its way, the more honest measure of the place.