The Chapada do Araripe is a tableland standing between 700 and 900 metres above the semi-arid interior, near the point where Ceará meets Pernambuco and Piauí. Part of it had already been protected as an Environmental Protection Area since 1997. The geopark that now covers 3,796 square kilometres of it is not a fenced reserve but a working landscape shared by six municipalities: Barbalha, Crato, Juazeiro do Norte, Missão Velha, Nova Olinda and Santana do Cariri. People live and farm and quarry inside it. Juazeiro do Norte, the pilgrimage city built around the memory of Padre Cícero, sits within its boundaries. This is the Cariri, a green pocket in the middle of the sertão, and the geopark is an argument that the region's geology and the lives lived on top of it belong in the same frame.

In September 2006 the region joined the Global Geoparks Network, recognised by UNESCO for geological and palaeontological heritage of international significance. It was the first such designation anywhere in the Americas. A geopark is not a park in the North American sense; it is a territory organised around geosites - specific locations of scientific, cultural or environmental value - with education and local economic development written into the mandate. Araripe has nine geosites open to visitors, spread across all six municipalities. The designation worked as a template. Brazil has since gained further UNESCO Global Geoparks in the South and Northeast, and researchers have begun surveying the Pernambuco side of the plateau, around Araripina, Moreilândia and Exu, on the argument that the geology does not stop at a state line.

The Araripe Basin is Brazil's most important Cretaceous fossil deposit, and by most measures the richest pterosaur site on Earth - no other locality has yielded so dense a concentration of remains from those flying reptiles. Insects are recorded from more than twenty orders, dating to roughly 110 million years ago, which gives an unusually complete picture of Cretaceous invertebrate diversity. There are fossils of some of the first flowering plants, preserved well enough to show how early insects and early flowers were already dealing with each other. Weathering of these same rocks produced the distinctive soils of the plateau, and the moist forest that grows on those soils is the only habitat the Araripe manakin has.

In 2013 French customs officers at the port of Le Havre opened a consignment and found 998 fossils from the Araripe region: fish, insects, birds, plants and pterosaurs, all Cretaceous, all stolen. The people behind the shipment were later identified and arrested in Brazil, but recovering the material took more than eight years of work by Itamaraty, Brazilian law enforcement and French diplomats. On 24 May 2022 the first shipment - close to two tonnes of rock - started for home, in a case that Brazilian officials framed as an enforcement of the 1970 UNESCO convention against illicit trafficking in cultural property. The recovered fossils are destined for the Plácido Cidade Nuvens Palaeontology Museum at Santana do Cariri, inside the geopark, a short drive from the quarries they came out of.

Sustainable tourism was the promise when the designation came through, and it has delivered jobs and infrastructure to towns that had little of either. But the more durable effect has been quieter. School programmes and university partnerships mean children in Crato and Nova Olinda grow up knowing that the flagstone under their feet contains dragonflies from before the Atlantic Ocean was finished. The manakin, meanwhile, has become a cultural symbol rather than an ornithological footnote - a small critically endangered bird whose survival depends on a single square kilometre of forest, standing in for a region learning to treat its own ground as something other than raw material.