State of Ceará

The same wind that killed Ceará is now making it rich. For centuries, the sertão—Brazil's semi-arid interior—delivered periodic devastation: the Grande Seca of 1877-1880 killed between 200,000 and 500,000 people and sent 120,000 refugees to the Amazon rubber plantations. Now that wind generates over 90% of Brazil's international internet traffic and powers the largest green hydrogen ambitions in Latin America. Ceará didn't escape its geography; it discovered that geography serves different masters under different conditions.

Portuguese colonization began in 1603 when settlers established Fort São Tiago—and abandoned it one year later when drought proved unsurvivable. The Dutch built Fort Schoonenborch in 1649; the Portuguese captured it in 1654 and renamed it Fortaleza. For three centuries, the pattern repeated: cattle ranching in the interior, subsistence farming when rains came, exodus when they didn't. The sertão's caatinga scrubland is adapted for dormancy, cycling between apparent death and revival; the colonial economy simply exported people during downturns instead.

The Grande Seca transformed Ceará from a backwater into a national crisis. Over 100,000 retirantes flooded Fortaleza, quadrupling the capital's population. The imperial government eventually shipped migrants to the Amazon, where they became the labor force for Brazil's first rubber boom. The drought also birthed the indústria da seca—a political economy where local politicians traded drought relief for votes, building reservoirs that benefited landowners while the poor remained dependent. This infrastructure-for-patronage pattern persisted for a century.

What broke the cycle was geography revalued through network effects. Fortaleza sits at South America's closest point to Europe and Africa, making it the natural landfall for transatlantic cables. The EllaLink cable to Portugal, the Angola Cables SACS system to Luanda, and 14 other submarine systems now terminate at Praia do Futuro—hosting data centers from Scala (investing R$ 2.2 billion), V.tal, and AngoNAP while handling over 90% of Brazil's international internet traffic. Data centers followed cables; tech talent followed data centers. Fortaleza now hosts over 16,000 tech workers, ranks first in Latin America for submarine cable landings, and has become Brazil's fourth-largest city. This is phenotypic plasticity at regional scale: the same geography expressing completely different economic outcomes under changed conditions.

The wind that desiccated crops now drives industrial-scale transformation. Ceará receives average solar irradiation of 6.5 kWh per square meter daily and consistent Atlantic winds. Over 36 memoranda of understanding worth more than $40 billion have been signed for green hydrogen production at the Port of Pecém, with projects from Fortescue, EDF Renewables, and Casa dos Ventos. The World Bank committed $134 million in 2025 to accelerate the hub's development. The state's GDP grew 6.49% in 2024—nearly double Brazil's rate—driven by agriculture rebounding 25% and industrial output surging 10%.

Ceará faces its familiar constraint transformed: the same geography that made it drought-prone now makes it energy-rich, but power grid capacity limits green hydrogen scale-up until transmission lines reach Pecém around 2032. Whether Ceará completes this phase transition from drought victim to energy exporter depends on whether infrastructure can match resource potential. The resurrection pattern is clear—the question is whether this revival sticks. Explore the dormancy mechanism to understand how organisms—and economies—survive cycles of apparent death.