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Ceara , covering a vast area, but with less than nine million inhabitants, has long borne the brunt of the vagaries of the Northeastern climate. Droughts were recorded here as early as the seventeenth century. In the 1870s, as many as two million people may have died in a famine provoked by drought, and as recently as the early 1980s people were reduced to eating rats, while the population of Fortaleza grew by about a third as people fled drought in the interior. Yet for all its problems Ceara has kept a strong sense of identity, making it a distinctive and rewarding state to visit. Its capital, Fortaleza , is the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the Northeast after Recife and Salvador. The sertao is unforgiving to those who have to live in it, but in Ceara it rewards the traveller with some spectacular landscapes: as you travel west, the flat and rather dull plains of Rio Grande do Norte gradually give way to ranges of hills, culminating in the extreme west of the state in the highlands and lush cloud forest of the Serra da Ibiapaba , the only place in Brazil where you can stand in jungle and look down on desert. To the south there are the hills and fertile valleys of Cariri , with the pilgrim city of Juazeiro do Norte. And the coastline boasts some of the wildest, most remote and beautiful beaches in Brazil. Save for a few sheltered valleys with relatively reliable rainfall, sugar cane does not grow in Ceara and it never developed the plantation economy of other Northeastern states. Ceara was and remains cattle country, with the main roads and centres of population in the state following the route of the old cattle trails. As settlement by the Portuguese and serious economic development began over a century later than in the sugar-zone states, and only really got going in the last century, there are very few buildings that date back to colonial times - and, indeed, nothing colonial remains in Fortaleza. In recent years, Ceara has developed a reputation as one of the best-governed states in Brazil. Successive governors from the PSDB , the Social Democratic Party of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, have done much to reduce poverty and disease through imaginative health and education schemes. For the visitor, all this gives Ceara the feeling of an up-and-coming place where things are changing fast.
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