Qualla: Caatinga

Caatinga: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rafael Drake, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Tupi called it ka'atinga - white forest. Anyone who has flown over northeastern Brazil in October understands the name immediately. For most of the year the interior is grey-white to the horizon: bare branches, pale bark, the shadowless glare of thorn scrub that has dropped every leaf it owns rather than lose water through it. Then the rains arrive, and within days the same ground is green. Trees that looked dead for eight months leaf out and flower and set seed in a compressed three-month burst, and then shut down again. The Caatinga is not a desert. It is a forest that has learned to spend most of its life switched off.

Read more: Caatinga on Qualla

Image: Rafael Drake | CC BY-SA 3.0

Caatinga: Nine States, and Nowhere Else

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marcos Elias de Oliveira Júnior, CC0. The biome runs across the interior of the Northeast behind the coastal fringe of Atlantic Forest, covering parts of nine states: Piauí, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Alagoas, Sergipe, Bahia and a slice of Minas Gerais. That comes to 912,529 square kilometres, c...

Read more: Caatinga on Qualla

Image: Marcos Elias de Oliveira Júnior | CC0

Caatinga: The Grammar of Thirst

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Allan Patrick from Mossoró, Brasil, CC BY-SA 2.0. Rainfall averages somewhere between 20 and 80 centimetres a year, and it is intermittent and violent rather than steady - irregular winds arrive from every direction and the water comes down hard when it comes at all. Every plant here is an answer to that arithmetic. Cacti and ot...

Read more: Caatinga on Qualla

Image: Allan Patrick from Mossoró, Brasil | CC BY-SA 2.0

Caatinga: Twenty-Six Million People

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. This is not empty country. Twenty-six million people live in the Caatinga, farming ground that gives grudgingly and only sometimes. Much of the agriculture is slash-and-burn, and much of it works with native species rather than against them. One of the most productive is a bee: M...

Read more: Caatinga on Qualla

Image: Public domain

Caatinga: The River and the Salt

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eugenio Hansen, OFS, CC BY-SA 3.0. The São Francisco changes the equation wherever irrigation reaches it. The soil is genuinely fertile, and irrigated valleys along the river now export grapes, papayas and melons; the promise held out is that the Northeast becomes a breadbasket. The catch is chemistry. Irrigating ...

Read more: Caatinga on Qualla

Image: Eugenio Hansen, OFS | CC BY-SA 3.0

Caatinga: One Percent

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kennedy Silva, CC BY-SA 3.0. Estimates put somewhere between a quarter and a half of the Caatinga's original vegetation as already transformed by economic development. Against that, only about one percent of the biome sits inside strict-protection conservation areas, with a further six percent under sustaina...

Read more: Caatinga on Qualla

Image: Kennedy Silva | CC BY-SA 3.0