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.
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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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