Ecologists call these places brejos de altitude, and they are among the stranger features of the Brazilian Northeast — patches of humid forest, generally above 500 metres, stranded inside the drought polygon. They are not oddities of gardening but relicts. When the climate was wetter, Atlantic Forest ran much farther inland; when it dried, the forest retreated to the only ground still catching enough orographic rain to sustain it, and there it stayed. Walk up from the caatinga around Brejo da Madre de Deus and the transition is abrupt: grey thorn and cactus giving way, within a few hundred metres of elevation, to closed canopy, ferns, and the Sobradinho and Araras waterfalls running where no water has any business being. The lookout on the Serra da Prata, a thousand metres up, puts both landscapes in the same frame.

Altitude buys Brejo a season the rest of the region does not get. In the Pernambucan interior's high micro-climates, July temperatures can fall toward 8 degrees Celsius — genuinely cold by local standards, and cold enough to have created an industry. Brazilians from neighbouring states drive up in the middle of the year specifically to be chilly, and Brejo da Madre de Deus appears on the short list of winter destinations alongside Garanhuns, Gravatá, Triunfo and Taquaritinga do Norte. The tourism is the mild kind: wood smoke, hot food, sweaters worn slightly self-consciously in a country better known for the opposite complaint.

The town centre keeps more of its past than its size suggests. Colonial tiles from the 1700s and the early 1800s still face buildings around the old core, and the Matriz de São José dates to 1792, with the Matriz de Nossa Senhora do Bom Conselho anchoring the other end of the civic geography. The building worth crossing the square for is the Casa da Câmara e Cadeia, an early nineteenth-century town hall with the jail underneath it, attributed to the French engineer Louis Léger Vauthier, whose work reshaped a good deal of Pernambuco's public architecture. It now serves as a cultural centre. Brejo became a vila in 1833 and an independent municipality in 1893; the small Museu Histórico do Brejo da Madre de Deus holds what survives of the record. On market day the streets do what Northeastern streets have always done — a feira spread across the pavement, loud and unhurried.

Twenty-odd kilometres from the centre, in the district of Fazenda Nova, stands the thing most Brazilians associate with the municipality's name. Nova Jerusalém is a stage in the shape of a walled city — roughly 100,000 square metres of granite masonry, widely described as the largest open-air theatre in the world — built for the annual Paixão de Cristo, a Passion play performed here since 1951 and staged in the purpose-built complex raised between 1956 and 1968 under the architect Plínio Pacheco. The cast is drawn substantially from Fazenda Nova itself; the village supplies its own crowds, soldiers and onlookers, year after year. Beside it, the Parque de Esculturas Monumentais Nilo Coelho fills a field with oversized granite figures carved by local artisans on themes from regional history. Fazenda Nova also has public thermal waters, which is a very different reason to visit.

The municipality's outdoor draws are geological. Pedra do Cachorro — Dog Rock — is a granite outcrop laced with trails through caatinga vegetation, climbed and rappelled by people who drive out from Caruaru for the weekend. Pedra da Lua, Moon Rock, carries prehistoric paintings on its surfaces, evidence of occupation long predating anything in the town's archive. Between the trekking and the theatre, most of the money here comes from something less scenic: sulanca, the regional garment trade that stitches cheap clothing across this corner of the Agreste and feeds the enormous markets at Caruaru and Toritama. Add goat, macaxeira, cocada and forró, and the fine Renascença lace the region's women have made for generations, and the town is legible — a highland island that has learned to sell rain, rock, faith and thread.