Mangue Seco

The sand is winning. Mobile dunes are moving west and north across the reserve and over the edge of the settlement, and the coconut palms in their path have gone under: eight metres tall, and what shows now is the tips of the highest fronds, while on the next ones along the fruit bunches rest on the surface of the dune. The state environment institute writes down what the people who live here are afraid of, which is that the built part of Mangue Seco is getting smaller.

Mangue Seco sits in the municipality of Jandaíra, at the far northern end of the Bahian coast, between the estuary of the Rio Real and the sea and hard against the Sergipe border; it was an indigenous village before it was a fishing one. The protected area around it covers 3,395 hectares, dunes are about forty per cent of that, and INEMA describes the fixed and mobile sand together as a singular and highly fragile landscape whose balance depends on being managed. Arriving is a choice of three: a ten-minute launch from the Atracadouro do Pontal, where you leave the car at the jetty and settle the fare with the boatman, a thirty-minute crossing from Porto do Cavalo if you come from Aracaju, or a 4x4 along the beach from Costa Azul. The village became known across Brazil for two reasons at the same time, the filming of Tieta do Agreste, broadcast in 1989 and repeated in 1994, and a road that improved. Seven pousadas take guests, the dune circuits by buggy and quad bike average forty minutes, boats run out on the Rio Real, the Rio Apraius and the Barra da Estância, and the broad-snouted caiman and the maned sloth that live in the reserve are both threatened with extinction.