What It is Wish to Go to Brazil’s Lençóis Maranhenses Nationwide Park — House to Bone-white Sand Dunes and Sky-blue Lagoons

Like most anybody who lives within the oases on the coronary heart of Brazil’s Lençóis Maranhenses Nationwide Park, a sprawling subject of bone-white sand dunes and cerulean lagoons, Cassio José França Souza can determine his family and friends by their footprints. Souza, who grew up within the riverside fishing village of Santo Amaro do Maranhão, simply outdoors the park, leaves singular tracks within the talcum-soft sand, with large toes that hold off the entrance of his sandals. His spouse’s prints, he advised me with an affectionate grin, one dazzling morning in June, are “small and spherical.”

Although Souza first guided guests into the park 15 years in the past, when he was nonetheless a teen, it was his spouse who grew up amongst these dunes, in an oasis referred to as Baixa Grande. “All the pieces I do know, I realized from her, and she or he realized all the pieces she is aware of from rising up right here,” Souza advised me as we walked previous amphitheaters of sand and parabolas of water painted onto a cyclorama sky. Her title, he advised me, was borderline biblical: Maria dos Milagres, or Maria of Miracles.

By the point I met Souza, I’d been plotting a go to for a number of years. I’d browsed reams of images, most taken from prop planes or drones, exhibiting scallop-edged dunes and chevron-shaped lakes in shades of tourmaline and lapis. I’d perused scholarly articles that modeled the motion of the dunes, which may migrate inland by a staggering 32 toes every year. Others traced the origins of the almost 400-square-mile ecosystem way back to the final Ice Age. The most important of its type in South America, this stretch of dunes is the product of riverine sediments trapped there, lower than three levels south of the equator, by a coincidence of currents, tides, and winds. Within the literary report, although, I discovered virtually nothing in regards to the Lençóis, because the dune subject is understood for brief, or the windblown coast to the east towards the Parnaíba River — nothing that positioned individuals there in any respect. The Lençóis and the encircling area appeared as extraterrestrial and uninhabitable as Saturn.

Till just lately, tourism tended to be as hardscrabble as you may think. The primary wave of holiday makers broke on the shores of Maranhão, the northeastern state wherein the park is positioned, within the Nineteen Nineties. Most had been kitesurfers chasing the commerce winds that sweep west alongside the coast — the identical pure forces which have formed the Lençóis for millennia. The 2002 completion of a paved freeway connecting São Luís, the capital of Maranhão, to the industrial city of Barreirinhas opened entry to the park’s periphery. In 2016, Pierre Bident Moldeva, cofounder of the gracious Chez Georges Villa in Rio de Janeiro, opened a laid-back retreat referred to as La Ferme de Georges within the fishing village of Atins, on the park’s jap edge. Three years after that, Thierry Teyssier introduced the pioneering nomadic lodge undertaking, 700,000 Heures, to Santo Amaro. Then, throughout the pandemic, rich Brazilians, compelled to desert their regular haunts in Europe and the U.S., turned their gaze inward and, lo, an “it” vacation spot was born.

In 2023, Lençóis Maranhenses Nationwide Park recorded greater than 250,000 guests, a 150 % improve over 2020. Most come in the hunt for the identical mind-bending landscapes that I’d seen in these images — which, make no mistake, the park provides in hallucinatory profusion. I spent my first day there following Souza over ridges of sand sculpted into voluptuous geometries that put Oscar Niemeyer’s concrete fantasias to disgrace. I plunged into freshwater lagoons so empty and so blue that swimming in them felt like swimming within the sky. I flung myself, arms pinwheeling, down a vertiginous slope of sand and heaved myself into cool, nonetheless water. Turning round, nonetheless grinning, I noticed — or was I imagining it? — that the wind had already erased my footprints, as if I couldn’t, or shouldn’t, have been there in any respect.

Arriving on the Lençóis nonetheless takes time, effort, and planning. My very own journey was organized by the London-based company Plan South America, and it started with a 3.5-hour flight from São Paulo to Jericoacoara, a preferred seashore resort about 160 miles east of the Lençóis. Tourism has not been type to Jericoacoara, stated Francisco Carvalho, who was the primary of many guides I met on my weeklong journey. As we drove to the tranquil Baía das Caraúbas lodge, about an hour and a half away, Carvalho defined that nobody fishes anymore, meals costs are out of attain for native households, and the city’s hottest web site, the Sundown Dune, has shrunk from a hovering 200 toes within the Nineteen Seventies to only 20 toes below the footfall of holiday makers. For the remainder of my time on the northern Brazilian coast, nearly everybody I spoke to cited Jericoacoara as a cautionary story.

Leaving Baía das Caraúbas, a dreamy cluster of bungalows on a stretch of virgin seashore, I drove west with Carvalho and Marta Tucci, who photographed this story, towards the bustling kitesurfing city of Barra Grande earlier than persevering with on to the expansive Parnaíba River Delta. From there, it took the higher a part of a day to navigate a labyrinth of distributaries and mangroves by boat. Capuchin monkeys patrolled the cover, which climbed as excessive as 130 toes, and crabs the colour of visitors cones scuttled over roots. 

For lunch, we stopped at a easy household restaurant owned by Raimundo Aires, a fisherman and boatbuilder who began promoting meals to the occasional customer greater than 20 years in the past. Throughout the river, a low mantle of vegetation grew alongside the shore — a brand new sandbank, Aires defined, creeping nearer every year. I requested what he deliberate to do when boats might not get to his restaurant. “We don’t fear about these issues round right here,” he stated, with fun and a shrug. “It’s simply nature.”

On a drive later that night, we raced the rising tide alongside a lonely stretch of coast below the silent watch of wind generators. Because the Preguiças River, an essential supply of the sediments that kind the Lençóis, sidled up from the south, the seashore narrowed to a spit of sand studded with seashore shacks, half-buried within the shifting dunes. Till the highway opened entry to Atins, a brief boat journey throughout the river, this place, referred to as Caburé, had been a preferred seashore city. At this time, it’s hardly on the vacationer radar in any respect. 

Lastly, after three days of near-constant transit, we arrived at La Ferme de Georges, in Atins. I spent the higher a part of the subsequent morning studying in a hammock below a pergola of untamed cashew timber outdoors my non-public bungalow. Later I visited La Ferme’s exuberant kitchen backyard, tended for the previous decade or so by Osmar Amorim, who first got here to Atins 30 years in the past. Amorim has seen this village of barely 100 households, nearly all of them devoted to fishing, remodel right into a seashore city that lives on tourism. Many neighbors offered their land early on; others have constructed rental rooms of their gardens, abandoning the normal agricultural strategies that Amorim conserves in his backyard. It’s laborious work, he stated, “however I get to dwell in a method that brings me pleasure.”

After lunch, which included a wonderful tangle of Amorim’s backyard greens, I took a brief stroll to La Ferme’s newly opened seashore home, a breezy pavilion sheltered by coconut palms just a few steps from the ocean. That afternoon, a bunch of native youngsters from a free day-care program referred to as Peixinhos da Areia, which interprets to Little Sand Fishes, had gathered round a picnic desk to bead bracelets and mould collectible figurines out of salt dough. Their presence made for a refreshing break from the standard barricade that luxurious resorts erect between locals and visitors. By subsequent yr, La Ferme intends to construct the Peixinhos a everlasting house alongside the seashore home. Tourism could have modified Atins, however on the lodge, the sensation of a village endured. 

However even Atins, with its broad, quiet seashore, its sluggish tempo and quick tides, was actually only a prelude—“the again door to the Lençóis,” as Rafael Carvalho, a biologist turned information, advised me the subsequent morning en path to the park. Earlier than transferring to Atins in 2019, Carvalho, initially from São Luís, had studied soil well being and small-scale agriculture within the Amazon, however radical reductions to scientific analysis below the right-wing administration of Jair Bolsonaro had pushed him from the sector. We linked up with Souza, and for the subsequent three days of our journey, Carvalho served as each a waggish foil to Souza’s unflappable calm and as an unusually clear-headed commentator on how conservation and tourism have reshaped the area, for higher and for worse. 

The park itself, he defined, was not completely optimistic for the individuals residing inside its boundaries, most of them descendants of settlers who arrived within the nineteenth century fleeing droughts within the arid inside. When Brazil’s army dictatorship established the park in 1981, it took as its mannequin the Nationwide Park Service of the USA, which, since its founding in 1916, has handled conservation areas as pristine, sacrosanct wilderness, and a handy technique of erasing the Native histories in these landscapes. Within the Lençóis, most households had no concept they lived on protected land till authorities got here to tell them of the brand new restrictions on their lifestyle, significantly on the agricultural practices that had sustained them for 150 years. Although individuals proceed to dwell within the park, authorities tellingly name the realm “the Primitive Zone.” As Carvalho advised me: “It’s ironic that they name it primitive, when it’s the federal government that insists on holding it that method.”

After an extended day of journey by highway and by boat, we arrived at Oiá, a lodge on the fringe of Santo Amaro. Oiá’s founder, São Paulo–based mostly inside designer Marina Linhares, first took observe of the realm in 2019 due to the 700,000 Heures pop-up. She instantly fell in love with the windswept coast and, when the 700,000 Heures residency ended, bought the property together with her husband, Tomas Perez. Remodeling it as a everlasting lodge, they wrapped the primary home in a deep veranda, constructed a pair of bungalows out again, and stuffed the interiors with works by artists from the northeast of the nation and furnishings by luminaries of Twentieth-century Brazilian design. It opened in Could 2023. 

After a restful evening in a visitor room in the primary home, I awoke to a blinding breakfast of recent fruit and just-baked bread served below the cover of a towering angelim tree. Quickly sufficient, I used to be lazing down the Rio Alegre in a kayak, drifting over its sluggish, translucent waters, which had been stained vermilion by iron oxide within the surrounding soil. For the hour after that, we heaved over rolling dunes — decrease on this facet of the park, serpentine somewhat than parabolic, the identical supplies molded into a completely totally different kind — within the open again of a 4 x 4. The dunes ultimately kneeled to the Atlantic, stretching out as a broad, empty seashore pierced with totems of petrified tree trunks. It seemed like the sting of the earth. Past that, previous the dunes and previous the seashore however nonetheless throughout the park’s boundaries, we arrived within the fishing village of Travosa. With its humble brick homes scattered alongside a slender dust observe, I imagined Travosa seemed the best way Atins did 30 years in the past.

We settled for lunch at Toca da Guaajá, a modest household restaurant named for the scarlet ibises that flit down the coast like twigs of coral heaved into the wind. Seated below a excessive, thatched pavilion surrounded by palm timber, we confronted the tidal channel the place Travosa’s fishermen seashore their boats and the place ladies collect at low tide to sift tiny clams, referred to as sarnambi, from the sand. As the most well liked hours slouched by, I feasted on wild mangrove oysters lashed with fresh-pressed coconut milk and medallions of basil. Morsels of sarnambi, smaller than pennies and faintly briny, got here stuffed in a grilled sea bass and stewed with coconut. For dessert, my host, Alcione Galvão, served a thick pudding of shaved coconut cooked down with cream and condensed milk, topped with aromatic amulets of lemon verbena. It was the most effective meal I ate all week. 

Afterward, I spoke with Galvão about life in Travosa, which, on our method in, had appeared like a ghost city: not a door open, not a light-weight on, not even the tinny rattle of a radio. “Although you didn’t see anybody on the street — it’s mid-afternoon, everyone seems to be at dwelling, out of the solar — everybody is aware of you’re right here,” Galvão advised me with an indulgent smile; in any case, no place, or nearly no place, is definitely empty. “Life in Travosa may be very precarious,” she went on. “We don’t have primary infrastructure for well being or training. If we might open issues to tourism, all of that may change.” She paused for a second. “We’ve been right here longer than the park. We’d wish to create new alternatives.” It was an optimistic view of tourism, which, as I’d seen that week, can create livelihoods, but additionally has the facility to displace households and conventional methods of life. In Travosa, although, it nonetheless represents hope.

Days earlier than that lunch in Travosa, I’d handed my first evening within the Lençóis within the easy however immaculate dwelling of Souza’s in-laws, Raimundo Garcia dos Santos and Maria da Silva Lira, who provide lodging within the hamlet of Baixa Grande. We watched the sundown from the ridge of a excessive dune, the skinny sliver of the Atlantic flashing throughout the horizon like a wayward firework, then continued on to the thatched-roof home the place Souza’s spouse had grown up. Surrounded by rustling carnauba palms and mirrored in a pond as nonetheless as a mirror, the scene was a storybook image of a desert mirage.

Seated across the kitchen desk, María advised us about transferring to Santo Amaro to search out work, which was scarce again dwelling within the oasis. Shortly after, she met Souza whereas washing garments on the banks of the Rio Alegre. She advised us, too, about their first journey to Baixa Grande: a 12-hour bike journey throughout the dunes. (“Midway by way of he requested if we had been shut and I advised him ‘Sure!’ ” she recalled with an enormous snigger. “We stored that sport going for the subsequent six hours!”) Three years in the past, they lastly moved again to Baixa Grande and took their first purchasers into the dunes collectively. 

Souza remembers that first journey fondly. “The simplicity of the lifestyle right here actually made an impression on me,” he advised me the next morning, as we scaled a younger dune that had just lately appeared alongside his in-laws’ home. With the oasis behind us, we walked east into the wind. A glimmer of sand smudged the distant dunes right into a lavender sky. “What I actually cherished was how humble individuals had been,” he went on, “how a lot they taken care of one another.”

After an evening in Baixa Grande, consuming and laughing like members of Souza’s household, it was clear that, no matter else has shifted within the Lençóis, the generosity and heat of its individuals has not been diminished. For me, it was proof that humanity can thrive, even within the least probably of locations. 

A model of this story first appeared within the February 2025 challenge of Journey + Leisure below the headline “Into the Blue.”