What It is Wish to Go to Brazil’s Lençóis Maranhenses Nationwide Park — Dwelling 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 discipline 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 exterior 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 informed 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 often called Baixa Grande. “All the pieces I do know, I discovered from her, and she or he discovered all the things she is aware of from rising up right here,” Souza informed me as we walked previous amphitheaters of sand and parabolas of water painted onto a cyclorama sky. Her title, he informed 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, displaying 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 might migrate inland by a staggering 32 toes annually. Others traced the origins of the practically 400-square-mile ecosystem way back to the final Ice Age. The biggest of its variety 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 concerning the Lençóis, because the dune discipline is thought for brief, or the windblown coast to the east towards the Parnaíba River — nothing that positioned folks there in any respect. The Lençóis and the encircling area appeared as extraterrestrial and uninhabitable as Saturn.

Till not too long ago, 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 through which the park is positioned, within the 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 japanese edge. Three years after that, Thierry Teyssier introduced the pioneering nomadic lodge venture, 700,000 Heures, to Santo Amaro. Then, in the course of the pandemic, rich Brazilians, compelled to desert their standard 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 p.c enhance over 2020. Most come in the hunt for the identical mind-bending landscapes that I’d seen in these photographs — which, make no mistake, the park affords 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 well-liked seaside resort about 160 miles east of the Lençóis. Tourism has not been variety 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 website, the Sundown Dune, has shrunk from a hovering 200 toes within the Seventies to only 20 toes underneath the footfall of holiday makers. For the remainder of my time on the northern Brazilian coast, just about everybody I spoke to cited Jericoacoara as a cautionary story.

Leaving Baía das Caraúbas, a dreamy cluster of bungalows on a stretch of virgin seaside, 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 site 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 annually. I requested what he deliberate to do when boats might now 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 underneath the silent watch of wind generators. Because the Preguiças River, an essential supply of the sediments that type the Lençóis, sidled up from the south, the seaside narrowed to a spit of sand studded with seaside shacks, half-buried within the shifting dunes. Till the street opened entry to Atins, a brief boat journey throughout the river, this place, referred to as Caburé, had been a well-liked seaside city. In the present day, 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 underneath a pergola of untamed cashew timber exterior my personal 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, virtually all of them devoted to fishing, rework right into a seaside city that lives on tourism. Many neighbors bought their land early on; others have constructed rental rooms of their gardens, abandoning the standard agricultural strategies that Amorim conserves in his backyard. It’s onerous work, he stated, “however I get to reside 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 seaside home, a breezy pavilion sheltered by coconut palms a couple of 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 mildew collectible figurines out of salt dough. Their presence made for a refreshing break from the standard barricade that luxurious motels erect between locals and company. By subsequent yr, La Ferme intends to construct the Peixinhos a everlasting house alongside the seaside home. Tourism could have modified Atins, however on the lodge, the sensation of a village continued. 

However even Atins, with its broad, quiet seaside, its sluggish tempo and quick tides, was actually only a prelude—“the again door to the Lençóis,” as Rafael Carvalho, a biologist turned information, informed 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 underneath the right-wing administration of Jair Bolsonaro had pushed him from the sphere. 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 constructive for the folks dwelling inside its boundaries, most of them descendants of settlers who arrived within the nineteenth century fleeing droughts within the arid inside. When Brazil’s navy dictatorship established the park in 1981, it took as its mannequin the Nationwide Park Service of america, 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 thought they lived on protected land till authorities got here to tell them of the brand new restrictions on their lifestyle, notably on the agricultural practices that had sustained them for 150 years. Although folks proceed to reside within the park, authorities tellingly name the realm “the Primitive Zone.” As Carvalho informed me: “It’s ironic that they name it primitive, when it’s the federal government that insists on maintaining it that method.”

After a protracted day of journey by street 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 be aware 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 along with her husband, Tomas Perez. Transforming it as a everlasting lodge, they wrapped the principle home in a deep veranda, constructed a pair of bungalows out again, and crammed 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 night time in a visitor room in the principle home, I awoke to a blinding breakfast of recent fruit and just-baked bread served underneath 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 quite than parabolic, the identical supplies molded into a completely completely different type — within the open again of a 4 x 4. The dunes finally kneeled to the Atlantic, stretching out as a broad, empty seaside pierced with totems of petrified tree trunks. It regarded like the sting of the earth. Past that, previous the dunes and previous the seaside 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 regarded the way in which 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 underneath a excessive, thatched pavilion surrounded by palm timber, we confronted the tidal channel the place Travosa’s fishermen seaside their boats and the place ladies collect at low tide to sift tiny clams, referred to as sarnambi, from the sand. As the most popular 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. “Despite the fact that you didn’t see anybody on the street — it’s mid-afternoon, everyone seems to be at house, out of the solar — everybody is aware of you’re right here,” Galvão informed me with an indulgent smile; in spite of everything, no place, or virtually 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 prefer 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 night time within the Lençóis within the easy however immaculate house 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 informed us about transferring to Santo Amaro to seek out work, which was scarce again house within the oasis. Shortly after, she met Souza whereas washing garments on the banks of the Rio Alegre. She informed us, too, about their first journey to Baixa Grande: a 12-hour bike journey throughout the dunes. (“Midway by he requested if we had been shut and I informed him ‘Sure!’ ” she recalled with an enormous giggle. “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 shoppers into the dunes collectively. 

Souza remembers that first journey fondly. “The simplicity of the lifestyle right here actually made an impression on me,” he informed me the next morning, as we scaled a younger dune that had not too long ago 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 liked was how humble folks 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 folks has not been diminished. For me, it was proof that humanity can thrive, even within the least doubtless of locations. 

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