Serra da Capivara

Serra da Capivara National Park was created by presidential decree on 5 June 1979 in the south-east of the state of Piauí, deep in the semi-arid north-east, and takes in part of the municipalities of São Raimundo Nonato, João Costa, Brejo do Piauí and Coronel José Dias. Its demarcation was completed in 1990 and it is under the tutelage of the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, with management in the hands of the Museum of the American Man Foundation.

The park owes its existence to the work of the archaeologist Niède Guidon, who drove its creation and chaired the managing foundation until her death in June 2025. It holds the largest and oldest concentration of prehistoric sites in the Americas: more than 900 sites are catalogued, of which more than 650 preserve rock paintings, and some 170 are open to visitors along fourteen trails. The paintings depict hunting scenes, dances, ceremonies and symbolic figures, and the datings proposed by the research have been the subject of intense international scientific debate on the antiquity of the peopling of the Americas.

The setting is caatinga, the semi-arid biome unique to north-eastern Brazil, with a flora and fauna of its own, on the boundary between two geological formations that produce a relief of ranges, valleys and plain. One notable zoological fact: the park holds the only known population of capuchin monkeys (Sapajus libidinosus) that habitually uses stone and wooden tools to obtain food and also to communicate and to threaten. UNESCO inscribed the park on the World Heritage List on 13 December 1991, and in 1993 IPHAN entered it in its Register of Archaeological, Ethnographic and Landscape Heritage.