The Seridó UNESCO Global Geopark covers an area of 2,800 km² in the semi-arid northeast of Brazil. It is home to more than 120,000 inhabitants, including communities like the Quilombolas, who keep alive the memory of their enslaved ancestors from Africa to preserve their culture through traditional practices, museums and cultural centres. The geopark bears testimony to the last 600 million years of the Earth’s history and shelters one of South America’s largest scheelite mineralizations, an important tungsten ore, as well as basalt flows that stem from volcanic activity during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic Eras. This geodiversity determines to a large extent the region’s unique biodiversity, especially characterized by the Caatinga (‘white forest’ in the Tupi language), an ecoregion marked by specific subtropical flora. The Caatinga is the only exclusively Brazilian biome, which means that much of its biological heritage cannot be found anywhere else on the planet.
