Popularly known as the Capital of the West, it is a city with significant regional importance, standing out in the traditional function of marketing rural products, resulting from the development of family agriculture, with emphasis on the large production of corn and beans, at the foot of the rich valleys in the region, geographically cut by the Poti River and Serra Grande.

The municipality contains part of the 6,137 hectares (15,160 acres) Serra das Almas Private Natural Heritage Reserve, which preserves an area of the Caatinga biome.

Crateús stands as the most prominent location in Ceará for this event, as it is the only city in the country where significant conflict and deaths occurred during the passage of the movement led by Luís Carlos Prestes, active in Brazil between 1925 and 1927.

Cabo Antonino Cabeleira and Tenente Tarquínio, members of the group, are buried in the city at a site known as the "Cemetery of the Rebels."

In some places, they were welcomed as saviors and heroes by the local population, while in others, they were received coldly and with suspicion due to their actions.

One key site was the Railway Station building (RFFSA), located in Gentil Cardoso Square.

Crateús is the only city in the interior of the Northeast to feature a work by Oscar Niemeyer, Brazil’s most renowned architect.

“Ideally, a Cultural Center should be built here to tell the story of the conflict that occurred in Crateús,” Raimundo points out.

Its original name was “Fazenda Piranhas” (the name given to the farm owned by Dona Ávila Pereira, due to the abundance of this fish in the region), later elevated to the category of town with the “Príncipe Imperial do Piauí”.

It consists of three horizontal stripes in yellow, white and green, and in the center is the municipal coat of arms.

The color white in the center of the flag and where most of the coat of arms is located symbolizes peace, harmony and prosperity.

The Coat of Arms of Crateús refers to the riches and beauty of the municipality, such as the Serra da Ibiapaba and the Poti River Valley, which once leveraged the city's economy with large rural productions in agriculture and livestock farming, as well as corn and bean crops in the rich valleys of the region.

He was given possession of these lands on the Lagoa das Almas farm, 18 kilometers southwest of Vila Príncipe Imperial (today the city of Crateús), on the left bank of the Riacho do Gado, which flows into the Poti River.

[45] With the expansion of the Sobral-Camocim Railroad into Piauí in 1911, the lands of Crateús were cut off by the railroad and, in 1912, two train stations were built in the municipality: Crateús[46] and Sucesso,[47] and then other stations were built in 1916 Poti,[48] in 1918 Ibiapaba,[49] in 1932 Oiticica[50] and santa Teresina [51 Due to the geographic accident of the Poti River canyon, which cuts through the Serra da Ibiapaba (Serra Grande) forming a natural connection between Ceará and Piauí, the mercantilism between the two states and the growth around the railroad, Crateús developed as an urban and commercial center in which various ethnic groups are present, both indigenous (Tabajara, Potyguara, Calabaça, Kariri, Tupinambá) and of African descent (Quilombos: Queimadas).

In the 1933 administrative division, Santana does not appear as a municipal district; in the table, in addition to the district-headquarters, only Graça, Ibiapaba, Irapuã and Tucuns appear.