Qualla: Serra das Almas Private Natural Heritage Reserve

Serra das Almas Private Natural Heritage Reserve: Introduction

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The reserve owes its existence to a twin-engine amphibious Sikorsky S-38 flown out of Milwaukee in September 1935. Herbert Fisk Johnson Jr., the second-generation head of S. C. Johnson & Son, put the aircraft down in Fortaleza, Ceará, on a mission that reads now like a corporate-era fairy tale: he wanted to know whether the carnauba palm of northeastern Brazil - Copernicia prunifera, whose waxy leaves made a polish his company depended on - could keep supplying his business into the future. He thought it could. He was right about the palm and, eventually, about something larger. What began as a wax-supply survey slowly grew into an environmental commitment that, 65 years later, produced the Serra das Almas Private Natural Heritage Reserve, today one of the best-protected expanses of caatinga left in Brazil.

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Serra das Almas Private Natural Heritage Reserve: From Wax Factory to Forest

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1937, S. C. Johnson had built a carnauba processing factory in Fortaleza. By 1938, the company added a research farm that was later donated to the University of Ceará's school of agronomy. The Brazilian subsidiary came in 1960. And in 1990 - nine years after Herbert's death - ...

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Serra das Almas Private Natural Heritage Reserve: Caatinga as a Place Worth Saving

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Caatinga is, to outsiders, the hardest Brazilian biome to love. It is dry, thorny, and gray for most of the year, its squat trees shedding leaves to survive the long northeastern drought. The plants look beaten - twisted trunks, knife-edge thorns, xerophytic leaves. Then the brie...

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Serra das Almas Private Natural Heritage Reserve: The Reserve Grows

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The reserve's boundaries have moved outward over the years. In November 2015 the purchase of the neighboring Fazenda Gameleira added 292 hectares of preserved caatinga, bringing the total area to 6,137 hectares and extending the reserve across the state line into Buriti dos Monte...

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Serra das Almas Private Natural Heritage Reserve: Hunters, Traffickers, Poachers

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The central threat at Serra das Almas is illegal hunting. The reserve shelters a fauna that other parts of the caatinga have largely lost - deer, peccaries, armadillos, agoutis, rock cavies - and all of them remain targets for subsistence and sport hunters operating in the surrou...

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0