Paraíba holds the far edge of a continent. Ponta do Seixas, a low headland inside the city limits of João Pessoa, is the easternmost point of mainland South America — and therefore of the Americas entire, which means the sun reaches the Western Hemisphere here first. The state is compact by Brazilian standards, about 56,440 square kilometres divided among 223 municipalities and just under four million people, most of them in a coastal strip that never gets far from the water. Behind the beaches the land does not stay flat for long. Within a couple of hours' drive inland the ground begins to rise, the air dries out, and the palm-and-cane landscape gives way to something considerably harder.

Geographers cut Paraíba into four bands, and the cuts are honest ones. The Zona da Mata is the humid coastal fringe. The Agreste is the transition, still catching rain but less of it. The Borborema is the plateau itself, a mass of ancient crystalline rock that lifts the middle of the state and, in the process, wrings the moisture out of the air moving west. Pico do Jabre tops it at 1,208 metres, the third-highest summit in the Northeast. Past the plateau lies the Sertão, semi-arid and caatinga-covered, where the rains come in a short burst early in the year or fail to come at all. The state took its name from the Paraíba river, which runs the length of that gradient. Rainfall follows a schedule worth knowing: most of the interior gets its water between January and April, the eastern coast and Agreste later, from April to June. October through December is the hottest and driest stretch, and in the cool months of June to August the higher ground can drop below 20 degrees Celsius.

Paraíba's economy reads like a list of things that survive hard ground. Cotton textiles lead the export figures at over a third of the total, followed by footwear at about a fifth — the state has a real leather and shoemaking industry, not merely a handful of workshops. Sugarcane and its alcohol account for roughly a tenth, fish and crustaceans about the same, and sisal, the stiff agave fibre that becomes rope and matting, for around seven percent. Cattle graze the drier interior; pineapple, maize and beans fill the fields where water allows. Services now make up more than half of state output. Tourism is the growth story, built on beaches that have not been overbuilt, ecotourism in the interior, and a festival calendar that draws Brazilians from across the country.

Ask a Paraibano when to visit and the answer is June. Festa Junina — the feast of Saint John, transplanted from Portugal and reinvented — begins on the eve of Saint Anthony's day on 12 June, peaks on the 24th, and runs to Saint Peter's day on the 29th. For those fifteen days there are bonfires in the streets, fireworks overhead, and quadrilha dancing performed by city people in exaggerated country costume, half homage and half affectionate parody. It falls in the tropical winter rather than at midsummer, which does nothing to diminish it. Campina Grande on the Borborema has built a national reputation on the strength of its São João, and adds Micarande, an out-of-season carnival, in April. The four days before Ash Wednesday belong to Carnival proper, when, as everywhere in Brazil, the streets stop belonging to traffic.

Two sites in the interior keep older records than any archive. Near Sousa in the western sertão, the Vale dos Dinossauros preserves fossilised trackways in the bed of the Peixe River — footprints pressed into Early Cretaceous mud and now exposed whenever the water drops, one of the richer concentrations of dinosaur tracks anywhere. Near Barra de Santana, the Pedra do Altar archaeological site marks a much later human presence on the same plateau. Between them sits a state that most foreign visitors skip on their way to somewhere better advertised. The capital keeps its colonial buildings and comparatively few outsiders; the Borborema keeps its granite and its weather; and the flag, planted over all of it, still says no.