Palmeiras exists because of stones. Mining in this part of the Chapada peaked between 1857 and 1861, and the settlement that served it was founded on 23 December 1890 as Villa Bella das Palmeiras, emancipated as a municipality three weeks later on 15 January 1891. Then the ground stopped paying. What followed the boom was drought and the flat vocabulary of scarcity that shows up in the municipal record — hunger, shortage, the high cost of food. This is the pattern all across the Chapada Diamantina: a violent rush, a fast collapse, and a century of towns left standing in the highlands with no obvious reason to be there. The precious stones are long gone from the economy. The mule tracks the prospectors cut through the canyons, though, turned out to be worth something after all.

Most visitors do not stop in Palmeiras town for long. They are heading to Caeté-Açu, universally called the Vale do Capão, a district about 22 kilometres away that has become the town's centre of gravity. Shared four-wheel drives run out from the bus station several times a day, because the road demands them. The valley itself runs roughly ten kilometres, sitting near 1,109 metres, and it is walled by the flanks of a geological structure with the marvellous name Anticlinal do Pai Inácio — an upfold in the ancient sandstone whose eroded remnants stand around the valley as isolated table-topped peaks. Three of them dominate: Morro do Camelo, Morro do Pai Inácio to the north, and the Morrão, rising inside the valley itself and turning up in more or less every photograph anyone takes here.

The Parque Nacional da Chapada Diamantina was created in 1985, and Palmeiras is one of the towns that sits at its edge — which converted the municipality, over a couple of decades, from a place people left into a place people arrive at. Capão is the northern staging post for the region's serious walking. The Vale do Pati, the multi-day traverse that most Brazilian trekkers rank among the country's best, is reached across the Gerais do Vieira, the high open ground that separates it from Capão. The Cachoeira da Fumaça, a plunge of nearly four hundred metres, is the day walk from this side. Access is organised through the local guides' association, the Associação dos Condutores de Visitantes do Vale do Capão, which charges an entry fee — a small but pointed detail, since it means the money to walk into the valley stays in it.

The service sector is now the largest part of the municipal economy, which is a dry way of saying that Palmeiras runs on visitors. Behind that sits agriculture — tomatoes, coconut, banana, pineapple, passion fruit, and cassava — and behind that, a quieter economy of remittances, money sent home by residents who work elsewhere. The 2022 census counted 10,383 people across 737 square kilometres, a rise of nearly a quarter since 2010, which makes Palmeiras one of the rare interior Bahian municipalities that is growing rather than emptying. The town seat sits at 697 metres. Rivers thread the municipality: the Preto, the Conceição, the Santo Antônio, the Cochó.

Nobody expects to be cold in the Bahian interior, and everybody eventually is. Temperatures here generally move between 17 and 27 °C, but winter nights on the plateau drop to 11 °C and lower, and campers in the Vale do Pati routinely underestimate this. The rains come from November to February. Annual totals run somewhere between 600 and 1,200 millimetres, a spread wide enough to tell you how unreliable the figure is in any given year — and despite a climate classified as sub-humid, the risk of drought in the municipality is real and recurring. It makes for a landscape of contradictions. Waterfalls pour off escarpments a few kilometres from ground that cracks in the dry season, and both are normal.