The feira grew up in the eighteenth century around a chapel to Nossa Senhora da Conceição, built in 1782; the town assembled itself around the trade rather than the other way round. It is now reckoned the largest open-air fair in Brazil, and walking it is less like shopping than like reading an index of the interior — lace and embroidery, leather goods, clay pots, medicinal roots and barks, food cooked on the spot. One corner of it runs on a different logic entirely. At the Feira do Troca-Troca, held Wednesdays and Saturdays, nothing carries a price: a chicken for a wristwatch, a parakeet for a bicycle, whatever two people can agree is fair. Money is optional here. Negotiation is not.

Vitalino Pereira dos Santos was born in Caruaru in 1909 and died there in 1963, and in between he changed what Brazilian folk art was permitted to depict. He worked in clay, and his subjects were the people around him: a fiddler, a jaguar hunter, a funeral carried in a hammock, the cangaceiros Lampião and Maria Bonita. Nothing was idealised. In 1947 the artist Augusto Rodrigues brought him to Rio for an exhibition of popular Pernambuco ceramics; MASP showed his work in São Paulo in January 1949, and by 1955 he was in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He had also played pífano in a zabumba band he formed in the 1920s, which suggests something about the range of the man. Mestre Vitalino lived in Alto do Moura, on Caruaru's edge, and his neighbours learned from him. UNESCO now calls that neighbourhood the largest centre of figurative art in the Americas. His house is a museum; the workshops around it are still working.

Caruaru calls itself the Capital do Forró, and every June it defends the title. The June cycle runs roughly thirty days, sweeping up Santo Antônio on the 13th, São João on the 24th and São Pedro on the 29th, then spilling into July — the 2022 edition ran from 4 June to 2 July. Records of lively June festivities here reach back to 1854 and 1856, but the modern scale is a deliberate construction: the city government began building the festival as a tourist draw in the 1980s, and in 1995 it opened the Pátio de Eventos Luiz Gonzaga, 44,000 square metres with room for 100,000 people on a full night. In 2019, the last edition before the pandemic, an estimated 3.2 million people passed through the city.

Between the fair and the festival, Caruaru keeps a set of small museums that read like a syllabus of the northeast. One is devoted to forró and named for Luiz Gonzaga. Another holds cordel, the cheap pamphlet poetry sold hanging from a string — a form that flourished in medieval Europe and survives as a living commercial trade in very few places outside this region. A third occupies the old Fábrica Caroá, which ran from 1935 to 1978 as Brazil's first factory spinning fibre from the caroá plant, a bromeliad of the dry interior. And the Memorial de Caruaru houses the city museum alongside an exhibit on the fair, because in a place like this the market is a perfectly serious subject for a museum.

Agreste cooking is built from what survives dry country. Goat and beef come salted and air-cured as carne de sol; buchada and sarapatel use the parts that would otherwise be discarded, seasoned hard enough that nobody apologises for them. Along Rua Mestre Vitalino in Alto do Moura, roast-goat houses sit within a few doors of the ceramics workshops — Rei do Bode and Bode Assado do Luciano on the same street as the potters. That proximity is a fair summary of how the neighbourhood works. You spend the morning looking at clay figures of rural life and the afternoon eating it.