Qualla: Petrolina

Petrolina: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Edson Hiroshi Aoki, CC BY-SA 4.0. The sertao is the place Brazilians leave. For a century the semi-arid interior of the Northeast has exported its people to Sao Paulo and Rio, driven out by droughts that arrive on no schedule and end on none either. Petrolina is the exception that proves how large the rule is. Between 1970 and 1990, while the populations of Pernambuco and Bahia grew by about half, the twin cities of Petrolina and Juazeiro more than doubled — the one stretch of the interior Northeast that has grown by taking people in. The reason is water, and the reason there is water is a dam.

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Image: Edson Hiroshi Aoki | CC BY-SA 4.0

Petrolina: Velho Chico and the Bridge

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Krauser levyl, CC BY-SA 4.0. Petrolina occupies the southernmost tip of Pernambuco, on the left bank of the Sao Francisco River at 376 metres above sea level. Directly across the water sits Juazeiro, in Bahia — a different state, a different time zone of local politics, and functionally the same city. The Pr...

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Image: Krauser levyl | CC BY-SA 4.0

Petrolina: The Dam That Rewrote the Valley

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abdias Jr, CC BY 2.0. Twenty-six kilometres upstream, the Sobradinho Dam was completed in 1979 and impounded one of the largest artificial lakes on Earth — a reservoir covering 4,214 square kilometres and stretching 400 kilometres up the valley, the thirty-fifth largest in the world by volume. It regu...

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Image: Abdias Jr | CC BY 2.0

Petrolina: Mangoes on the Red-Eye

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Krauser levyl, CC BY-SA 4.0. The numbers are hard to credit. Growers in the Petrolina-Juazeiro nucleus account for roughly 90 percent of Brazil's mango exports and 30 percent of its table grapes, having displaced Sao Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul as the country's leading exporters of both. In 2012 alone, Petro...

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Image: Krauser levyl | CC BY-SA 4.0

Petrolina: Wine at Nine Degrees South

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aquila Leite, Public domain. Serious viticulture arrived in the 1980s, and Petrolina now ranks as Brazil's second most important wine centre. Nothing about the setting is conventional. This is nine degrees south of the equator in a hot semi-arid climate, where the vines are irrigated and never experience the...

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Image: Aquila Leite | Public domain

Petrolina: What the Water Did Not Fix

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abdias Jr, CC BY 2.0. Prosperity here is real and it is unevenly held. In 2010, 20.9 percent of Petrolina's population — around 60,123 people — lived below Brazil's official poverty line, and 8.3 percent below the line of extreme poverty. The Gini coefficient stood at 0.6253, high even by Brazilian st...

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Image: Abdias Jr | CC BY 2.0