Jericoacoara

Two things here get confused with each other. The Duna do Pôr do Sol is the dune beside the village that everyone climbs in the evening. The Pedra Furada is a rock arch cut by the waves along the headland, half an hour up and over the Morro do Serrote or an hour along the shore when the tide allows it, and in July the sun goes down exactly through its cleft.

The streets are sand and private cars are barred from them. When electricity reached the village in 1998 the whole network was put underground, so there are no poles either, which is as much of the reason the night sky looks like that as the absence of asphalt. Around the village the Parque Nacional de Jericoacoara runs a dune field across nearly its whole extent, with mangroves, temporary lagoons and the Serrote, a 95-metre rock carrying a lighthouse and holding the park's high point. Getting here means 294 kilometres of the CE-085 out of Fortaleza to Jijoca and then twenty kilometres of dirt road, and inside the park driving on the dunes is prohibited outright, so the buggies run with local operators to Lagoa do Paraíso, Lagoa Azul and Tatajuba. None of this is obscure: the park took more than 1.5 million visits in 2022, third most visited protected area in Brazil, and in January 2024 the government sold a thirty-year concession on its visitor services for 61 million reais against 298.9 million of required investment.