Ubajara was a district before it was a city. On 24 August 1915, Law No. 1279 detached it and made it a municipality in its own right - a promotion driven in no small part by the growing fame of the grotto in the escarpment nearby. Towns in the Ceará interior generally earn their charters through cattle, cotton or a river crossing. Ubajara earned part of its through a hole in the rock. That origin still governs the place. The municipality covers 421 square kilometres and counted 32,767 residents at the 2022 census, spread across the seat and three districts: Araticum, Jaburuna and Nova Veneza. Fortaleza is 304 kilometres away by road, far enough that Ubajara belongs to the highlands rather than to the coast.

A 550-metre run and a three-minute ride carry visitors from the plateau rim down the cliff face toward the cave mouth. For a tourist it is a novelty. For Ubajara it is public infrastructure, and the town's balance sheet moves with it. When the teleférico stops, so does a meaningful share of the local economy, and it has stopped often. Travellers in December 2017 found it shut for major maintenance said to run until the following July; Brazilian accounts have recorded it out of service for two years at a stretch. Fares have climbed steeply across those cycles - what was once a few reais round trip later ran to tens of reais for the viewpoint or the waterfall. The alternative is a three-to-four hour walk down and back up, which means starting before ten in the morning if you intend to be out before the light goes.

The drive up from the sertão is a short lesson in geography. Below the escarpment lies caatinga: thorn scrub, grey for most of the year, hot. Above it, the air cools, fog collects in the mornings, and the vegetation turns green and layered. Ubajara sits in that upper world, in the humid pocket that the Serra da Ibiapaba wrings out of the trade winds. Climates in the municipality range from semi-arid on the lower flanks to tropical humid on top, and the difference is measured in tens of kilometres rather than hundreds. It is the reason the highland towns of the Ibiapaba - Tianguá, São Benedito, Ibiapina, Viçosa do Ceará and Ubajara among them - farm and cook and dress unlike their neighbours down on the plain.

Almost nobody arrives in Ubajara directly. The main long-distance bus lines run through Tianguá, the larger town up the highway, and travellers transfer there. Once you are in town, the scale is modest: the Igreja Matriz de Santo Antônio anchors the centre, the streets are walkable, and the plateau edge is close enough that the view drops away at the end of the road. Ubajara National Park occupies the escarpment beyond, and the visitor traffic it generates is the single largest thing in the local economy - a small highland municipality that has organised itself, for more than a century now, around being the place you stay when you come to see something else.