Praia dos Carneiros

The chapel stands on the beach with nothing built up around it, and that is law rather than luck: bars may not set tables, chairs or parasols on this strip of sand, and fixed stalls are banned outright. When the tide pulls back, the reef offshore holds a set of pools behind it and people walk out into them. Behind the beach, the Rio Formoso is coming down to meet the sea.

Praia dos Carneiros belongs to Tamandaré, on the southern coast of Pernambuco, and the municipality puts the seafront chapel of São Benedito at the head of the five things it thinks worth seeing, calling it a witness of the centuries. The state calls the beach one of the most wanted destinations in Brazil, and says so inside the document explaining why it had to be regulated: disorderly growth of local tourism around the mouth of the Rio Formoso. What came out of that runs to 58.3 square kilometres of land, sea and estuary, more ground than the whole municipality of Olinda, worked out over two years with around 360 people taking part. Under it this beach is its own subzone, where kayaks and stand-up paddleboards may be hired only inside designated selective areas, jet-ski hire and banana boats are out, and each tourism vessel gets a single nautical outing a day. Over the reef complex boats hold to ten knots, anchoring is confined to selective areas, feeding the fish is prohibited, and so is selling or drinking alcohol. There is plenty down there worth the rule: surveys of the Tamandaré reefs have recorded 103 fish species, forty of which come inside the Rio Formoso itself. Rain runs the other timetable, with about three quarters of the year's 1,977 millimetres falling between March and August; from September the river slackens and the sea pushes back up the estuary.