The second half of the foundation's name points at the Kariri, the Indigenous people this whole region is named for and whose material traces are still coming out of the ground around the town. Alongside the archaeological holdings the foundation keeps an archive of its own making — DVDs, comics and other material produced in-house — so the collection documents both an ancient culture and the ongoing effort of a small town to hold onto it. Recognition followed. Nova Olinda's Casa Grande became the first *Pontão de Cultura* in Ceará, designated during Gilberto Gil's tenure as Brazil's Minister of Culture, and in 2009 IPHAN gave it the title of *Casa do Patrimônio*. Alemberg Quindins received the Ordem do Mérito Cultural in 2004, along with honorary doctorates from universities in the region.

On the descent from the Chapada do Araripe, at the Sítio Olho d'Água de Santa Bárbara, a natural sandstone arch spans a stream that only carries water after rain. It is called the Ponte de Pedra, and it is one of nine designated geosites of the Araripe UNESCO Global Geopark — 3,796 square kilometers across six Cariri municipalities, Nova Olinda among them. UNESCO first recognized the area in 2006; it became a UNESCO Global Geopark in 2015. The geopark's international reputation rests on Cretaceous fossils from the Araripe Basin, above all pterosaurs, preserved in fine laminated rock laid down when the splitting of Pangaea opened the basin. Standing on the arch, you are on the seam between two Northeasts: the forested top of the chapada behind you, where people still gather pequi, and the open sertão dropping away in front.

The arch was a crossing long before it was a viewpoint. Rock engravings and paintings survive near it, and the surrounding ground yields ceramic sherds and worked stone left by the Kariri and the peoples who preceded them on this escarpment. Later the same gap in the rock served vaqueiros moving cattle up and down between the chapada and the plain. Few places let you read geological time and human time in one view; this is one of them, which is a large part of why it was made a geosite rather than simply a scenic overlook.

The town's other museum is the Museu do Ciclo do Couro — the Museum of the Leather Cycle — built around the work of the saddler Espedito Seleiro, whose vividly dyed leather goods are known across the Northeast and whose craft is the visible survivor of the economy that built the house Casa Grande now occupies. A short walk away is the Teatro Violeta Arraes, opened on 19 November 2002 and named for Violeta Arraes, its architecture drawing on the sugarcane mills of the Cariri. It was built expressly so that the children of the community would have somewhere to encounter performance — the same logic, and largely the same generation, as the foundation up the street.

Nova Olinda covers 284.4 square kilometers at roughly 445 meters of elevation, some 560 kilometers from Fortaleza, with about 15,800 residents by IBGE's 2021 estimate. Average temperatures run 24 to 26°C and the rain arrives between January and May. The vegetation lists for the municipality include thorny deciduous forest — proper caatinga — and evergreen rainforest in the same breath, which is not a combination the Brazilian Northeast usually offers; the Chapada do Araripe pulls enough moisture out of the air to support both within a few kilometers. Brazil's Ministry of Tourism counts Nova Olinda among 65 national tourism-inducing destinations, one of only four in Ceará. That is conspicuous company for a place that was a district of Santana do Cariri, and before that a settlement called Tapera, until it became a municipality in its own right in 1957.