Qualla: Serra da Capivara National Park

Serra da Capivara National Park: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Red figures the size of a hand run in a line across the sandstone, arms lifted, knees bent. It is a dance — unmistakably a dance — painted onto a canyon wall in a corner of Brazil where the ground cracks open in the dry season and almost nothing grows above knee height. Nobody knows the names of the dancers or the name of the painter. What survives is the gesture, held in haematite red against pale rock for thousands of years, in a place that has more of these panels than almost anywhere on the planet.

Serra da Capivara National Park: Where the Caatinga Bites

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Serra da Capivara National Park covers 129,140 hectares — roughly 1,290 square kilometres — of southeastern Piaui, spilling across the municipalities of Sao Raimundo Nonato, Sao Joao do Piaui, Coronel Jose Dias and Canto do Buriti. The name means Capybara Hills, though the range ...

Serra da Capivara National Park: The Galleries Nobody Built

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

More than a thousand archaeological sites have been recorded inside the park boundaries, and researchers keep finding more. The paintings belong to what Brazilian archaeologists call the Nordeste tradition, one of a set of regional rock-art styles catalogued across the country al...

Serra da Capivara National Park: One Woman's Petition

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The park exists because Niede Guidon went looking. A Brazilian archaeologist trained at the Sorbonne, she began working in southeastern Piaui in 1973 with a joint Brazilian-French team. What she found convinced her the region needed protection more than it needed excavation. In 1...

Serra da Capivara National Park: The Other Toolmakers

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The park's bearded capuchins have what primatologists describe as the largest known tool kit of any wild capuchin population. They use stones for cracking food open, for threat displays and in sexual display. They probe with sticks. On the ground they loosen soil with a stone and...

Serra da Capivara National Park: Hard to Reach, Hard to Keep

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sao Raimundo Nonato, the town at the park's gate, sits about 576 kilometres from Teresina. A regional airport opened there in 2015, which helped, but the park has never drawn the crowds its significance would suggest — 12,238 visitors in 2021, a rounding error next to what a comp...