Northeast Brazil

Brazil's Northeast is the country's great endemism frontier, a mosaic of Caatinga dry forest, Atlantic Forest fragments, and Cerrado spread from Ceará to Bahia.

It is a region of dramatic contrasts: the sculptural, drought-adapted Caatinga, the only biome unique to Brazil; humid mountaintop forest islands, the brejos de altitude, surrounded by dry country; the canyons of Canudos; and the threatened coastal forest of the Pernambuco Center of Endemism.

For birders it means trophies found nowhere else, led by the Araripe Manakin, restricted to a single plateau, and Lear's Macaw at Canudos, alongside a roll call of critically endangered Atlantic Forest endemics. Culturally it is a heartland of Brazilian folk tradition, cuisine, and music, and our routes thread that human landscape as much as the wild one.