The vacant land was acquired under decree 33.193 of 27 May 1986. The Canudos State Park itself was established a month later by decree 33.333 of 30 June 1986: 1,321 hectares in the municipality of Canudos, about 410 kilometers inland from Salvador, reached from highway BR-235 by a paved access road. The decree handed the job of building it to the Department of Education and Culture working through the State University of Bahia (UNEB), and the park is still run through UNEB's Centro de Estudos Euclydes da Cunha. Its stated purpose is the part that stands out. Land decrees usually talk about conservation, watersheds or recreation. This one says the park exists to make it impossible to forget the martyrs led by Antônio Conselheiro. A Brazilian state, on official letterhead, calling the people its own national army killed *martyrs* — that is the argument the park was built to win.

A five-kilometer trail runs through the strategic points of the 1897 fighting. Signs identify the military camps, the field hospitals, the trenches, and two separate cemeteries: one for the soldiers, one for Conselheiro's followers. It passes the *Vale da Morte*, the Valley of Death, where the army buried its own dead in graves so shallow that erosion keeps bringing bone back to the surface. It passes the *Vale da Degola* — the Valley of the Beheading, named for what was done to prisoners there. And it climbs the *Alto do Maio*, where Colonel Antônio Moreira César (1850–1897), who commanded the third expedition against the settlement, was killed. Nothing on the route is reconstructed. What you walk past is the actual terrain, annotated.

This is an open-air museum in the literal sense, with historical, archaeological and anthropological sites spread across the property. It is also a place that keeps producing evidence. Old rifle bullets, shrapnel and fragments of pottery lie loose on the surface, and although protective measures exist, the material remains vulnerable to visitors who want a souvenir — a small, continuous erosion of the record. Indoors, the interpretation leans on photographs, because the war was extensively photographed while it happened. The exhibition uses glass panels standing up to four meters high, carrying wartime and postwar images alongside maps of the region and engravings of the country. Relics and signage fill out the rest. The effect is less a memorial than a case file left open.

The park is dry and hot the whole year. Its vegetation is *caatinga*, the thorn scrub of the Brazilian interior — species that carry few leaves and many spines, heavy on cacti and bromeliads. When rain does arrive, empty riverbeds fill within minutes and can run dry again the same afternoon, leaving pools where animals come to drink. The Vaza-Barris behaved exactly that way until the dam changed it. This was the country Conselheiro's followers farmed, and the country two armies had to fight in. Research by the Canudos Project, co-funded by UNEB and the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado da Bahia, has catalogued around 120 native caatinga plant species inside the park, most of them *pau-de-rato* (*Caesalpinia pyramidalis*). UNEB and the hydroelectric company CHESF have put roughly a thousand native seedlings into the ground, with plans for more than ten thousand.

From the highest ground in the park the whole panorama of the Cocorobó reservoir opens up: a broad sheet of blue in a landscape organized entirely around the absence of water. Both things are true at once from up there. The dam serves the living, and it always did. It also drowned a town that people had rebuilt on the wreckage of the town before it. The war itself — Conselheiro, the four expeditions, the arithmetic of the dead that historians still cannot agree on — is a story told elsewhere. What this place offers is narrower and harder: the ground it happened on, still hot, still shedding bullets, with the reservoir sitting quietly over the rest of it.