An enormous expanse of barren white sand dunes enclosing vast freshwater lagoons, Brazil's Lençóis Maranhenses is a place of otherworldly splendour, said Michael Snyder in Travel + Leisure.
A national park since 1981, it covers an area of 600 square miles adjacent to the Atlantic coast, just three degrees below the equator in the northeast of the country. Exploring it is a near-hallucinatory experience. The dunes march on to infinity, each curving as voluptuously as a building by Oscar Niemeyer. The pools, which are filled in the rainy season, are so clear and blue that swimming in them feels "like swimming in the sky". And the park's surroundings are wild and lush, making the journey along the coast to reach it slow and complicated, but rewarding too.
Lençóis Maranhenses means "the bedsheets of Maranhão", the state in which this landscape lies. To get there, I flew from São Paulo to Jericoacoara, a beach resort about 160 miles east of the park, then travelled with a guide by 4WD over several days, eventually crossing the park to reach the fishing village of Santo Amaro, on its western edge. Tourism is a fairly new business in this remote corner of Brazil, but in recent years a few boutique hotels have opened. Among the best are Baía das Caraúbas, "a dreamy cluster of bungalows on a stretch of virgin beach" near Jericoacoara; La Ferme de Georges, in the village of Atins (where my private verandah was "under a pergola of wild cashew trees"); and Oiá, an art-filled hotel on the edge of Santo Amaro.
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We took a day to cross the "expansive" Parnaíba River delta, navigating its labyrinthine channels and mangroves by boat, and stopping to watch capuchin monkeys playing in the treetops. And equally magical was a journey over the dunes to a beach that felt like "the edge of the Earth" – but beyond which lay a "modest" family restaurant, Toca da Guaaja, where we feasted on a sublime sea bass and coconut stew.
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