Serra da Capivara National Park

Listen first. The dry scrub ticks in the heat. Thorny branches scrape together when the wind moves. Underfoot, the ground is pale sand and broken stone, and the air smells of dust and warm leaves. Ahead of you, the cliffs rise in bands of red, orange and cream. They look almost soft, like layered cake. Somewhere on that rock, painted by human hands thousands of years ago, small red figures are running, dancing and hunting.

Welcome to Serra da Capivara National Park, in the state of Piauí, in the dry interior of northeastern Brazil. The park spreads across several municipalities, and João Costa is one of the towns along its edge. This is not a place of grand buildings or famous monuments. It is a place of cliffs, canyons and rock shelters. And it holds one of the largest concentrations of prehistoric rock art anywhere in the Americas. Archaeologists have recorded more than a thousand sites inside its borders.

The landscape around you is called the caatinga. The word comes from an Indigenous language and is often translated as white forest. In the long dry season, many trees drop their leaves, and the bare grey branches give the hills a pale, silvery look. Then the rains come, and within days the same hills turn green. This is the only major biome found entirely inside Brazil. Its plants and animals have learned to survive heat, drought and sudden floods.

The name of the park carries a small surprise. Capivara is the Portuguese word for capybara — the large, gentle rodent that lives near rivers and marshes. Today this land is far too dry for capybaras. The name itself points to a wetter past. Scientists believe that, over many thousands of years, the climate here shifted between more humid and more arid periods. The paintings on the walls may record some of those changes, showing animals that no longer live nearby.

Now look closely at the paintings themselves. Most are done in red, made from iron-rich minerals ground into pigment. You will also see touches of white, yellow, grey and black. The figures are small, often no taller than a hand. Yet they are full of movement. People hold hands in circles. Hunters chase deer. Groups gather around a tree. Some scenes show couples, births, and what may be ceremonies. Researchers group many of these images into what they call the Nordeste tradition, a style known for lively human scenes.

What strikes many visitors is how human these images feel. There is humour in them, and tenderness. One figure seems to carry a child. Others appear to be dancing in a line. You also see animals that are easy to recognise: deer, armadillos, jaguars, and long-legged running birds that look like rheas, the South American cousin of the ostrich. Standing here, you are looking at a story that someone chose to tell, in a place they clearly returned to again and again.

The modern story of this park is tied to one person. Niède Guidon was a Brazilian-born archaeologist who trained and worked in France. She first came to this region in the 1970s after seeing photographs of the paintings. She stayed for the rest of her career. Her work helped bring about the creation of the national park in 1979. In 1991, UNESCO added Serra da Capivara to its World Heritage list, recognising the rock art as a treasure for all of humanity.

Guidon's research also started one of the great debates in American archaeology. At a rock shelter called Boqueirão da Pedra Furada, her team reported evidence that they believed showed human presence far earlier than most experts accepted at the time — tens of thousands of years ago. Many researchers questioned those claims. Some argued that the broken stones could have been shaped by nature, not by people. The debate is still open. But it pushed scientists everywhere to ask a bigger question: when did people really first reach the Americas?

Pedra Furada means pierced rock, and the name is easy to understand once you see it. High on one of the cliffs, there is a natural opening through the stone, like a window to the sky. Wind and water carved it over a very long time. It has become the park's best-known landmark. Below it, wooden walkways and viewing platforms let you get close to the painted walls without touching them. This careful design is part of why the site has survived so well.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. The paintings are not only on easy, open walls. Some sit high above the ground, on ledges that seem very hard to reach. That makes researchers wonder how the painters got there. Perhaps they used ladders or scaffolds of wood. Perhaps the ground level was different then. Perhaps the height itself had meaning. Nobody knows for certain. When you find a painting far above your head, take a moment to imagine the effort behind it.

The park also shapes life in the towns around it. Many local people work as trained guides, and visits to the main sites are made with them. They know the trails, the plants and the paintings well, and many grew up in families that have lived beside these cliffs for generations. Nearby, the town of São Raimundo Nonato is home to the Museum of the American Man, founded by Guidon's foundation, where you can see objects excavated from the region. A local pottery tradition has also grown up around the park, with designs inspired by the ancient figures.

As the day moves on, the colours of the canyon change. In the early morning, the rock looks cool and pink. At midday the light is flat and harsh, and the heat bounces off the stone. In the late afternoon, the cliffs glow deep orange and the shadows stretch across the valley floor. This is often the best time to look at the paintings, when the low light brings out the texture of the rock beneath them.

Before you go, look once more at the wall in front of you. Notice the small red figures, the cracks in the stone, the mineral stains that run down from above. These marks have survived sun, rain and an unknown number of years. The people who made them are long gone, and we do not know their names or their language. But they stood where you are standing. They looked out at these same hills. As you walk back along the trail, listen again to the dry branches, feel the warm sand under your feet, and carry that thought with you.