Chapada do Araripe
plateau in northeastern Brazil
The Chapada do Araripe, also known as the Serra do Araripe, is a chapada (plateau) in northeastern Brazil. The chapada forms the boundary of Ceará and Pernambuco states, and forms the watershed between the Jaguaribe River of Ceará, which flows northward into the Atlantic, and the much larger basin of the São Francisco River of Pernambuco and neighboring states, which drains eastward into the Atlantic. The Santana Formation, which is rich with fossils from the early Cretaceous, lies at the base of the chapada.
Ecology
The landscape surrounding the Chapada is mostly Caatinga, a semi-arid shrubland and savanna that covers most of northeastern Brazil's interior. On the Chapada's northeastern slope is an enclave of tropical moist forest. Rainfall here exceeds 1000 mm annually, and the landscape is lush and green in contrast to the surrounding Caatinga. This moist forest enclave includes several forest types, mostly Atlantic semi-deciduous moist forest composed of four distinct layers. Emergent trees grow more than 30 m tall, above a canopy layer where species of legumes, mahogany, and family Apocynaceae predominate. The moist forests are mostly similar in composition to the Atlantic Forest, with some elements from the Amazon and Cerrado. Other plateau plant communities include dry forest and Cerrado subhumid savanna.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Chapada do Araripe” is plateau in northeastern Brazil. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Chapada, Araripe and plateau, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5072889. VIAF identifies the subject as 235565491. Authority coordinates are -7.387, -40.216. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chapada do Araripe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.