This Lesser-known National Park Feels 'Extraterrestrial' With Bone-white Sand Dunes and Sky-blue Lagoons — Here’s What It Was Like to Visit

Like most anyone who lives in the oases at the heart of Brazil’s Lençóis Maranhenses National Park, a sprawling field of bone-white sand dunes and cerulean lagoons, Cassio José França Souza can identify his friends and family by their footprints. Souza, who grew up in the riverside fishing village of Santo Amaro do Maranhão, just outside the park, leaves singular tracks in the talcum-soft sand, with big toes that hang off the front of his sandals. His wife’s prints, he told me with an affectionate grin, one dazzling morning in June, are “small and round.”

Though Souza first guided visitors into the park 15 years ago, when he was still a teenager, it was his wife who grew up among these dunes, in an oasis known as Baixa Grande. “Everything I know, I learned from her, and she learned everything she knows from growing up here,” Souza told me as we walked past amphitheaters of sand and parabolas of water painted onto a cyclorama sky. Her name, he told me, was borderline biblical: Maria dos Milagres, or Maria of Miracles.

By the time I met Souza, I’d been plotting a visit for several years. I’d browsed reams of pictures, most taken from prop planes or drones, showing scallop-edged dunes and chevron-shaped lakes in shades of tourmaline and lapis. I’d perused scholarly articles that modeled the movement of the dunes, which can migrate inland by a staggering 32 feet each year. Others traced the origins of the nearly 400-square-mile ecosystem as far back as the last Ice Age. The largest of its kind in South America, this stretch of dunes is the product of riverine sediments trapped there, less than three degrees south of the equator, by a coincidence of currents, tides, and winds. In the literary record, though, I found practically nothing about the Lençóis, as the dune field is known for short, or the windblown coast to the east toward the Parnaíba River — nothing that placed people there at all. The Lençóis and the surrounding region seemed as extraterrestrial and uninhabitable as Saturn.

Until recently, tourism tended to be as hardscrabble as you might imagine. The first wave of visitors broke on the shores of Maranhão, the northeastern state in which the park is located, in the 1990s. Most were kitesurfers chasing the trade winds that sweep west along the coast — the same natural forces that have shaped the Lençóis for millennia. The 2002 completion of a paved highway connecting São Luís, the capital of Maranhão, to the commercial town of Barreirinhas opened access to the park’s periphery. In 2016, Pierre Bident Moldeva, cofounder of the gracious Chez Georges Villa in Rio de Janeiro, opened a laid-back retreat called La Ferme de Georges in the fishing village of Atins, at the park’s eastern edge. Three years after that, Thierry Teyssier brought the pioneering nomadic hotel project, 700,000 Heures, to Santo Amaro. Then, during the pandemic, wealthy Brazilians, forced to abandon their usual haunts in Europe and the U.S., turned their gaze inward and, lo, an “it” destination was born.

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In 2023, Lençóis Maranhenses National Park recorded more than 250,000 visitors, a 150 percent increase over 2020. Most come in search of the same mind-bending landscapes that I’d seen in those photos — which, make no mistake, the park offers in hallucinatory profusion. I spent my first day there following Souza over ridges of sand sculpted into voluptuous geometries that put Oscar Niemeyer’s concrete fantasias to shame. I plunged into freshwater lagoons so empty and so blue that swimming in them felt like swimming in the sky. I flung myself, arms pinwheeling, down a vertiginous slope of sand and heaved myself into cool, still water. Turning around, still grinning, I saw — or was I imagining it? — that the wind had already erased my footprints, as if I couldn’t, or shouldn’t, have been there at all.

Arriving at the Lençóis still takes time, effort, and planning. My own trip was organized by the London-based agency Plan South America, and it began with a 3.5-hour flight from São Paulo to Jericoacoara, a popular beach resort about 160 miles east of the Lençóis. Tourism has not been kind to Jericoacoara, said Francisco Carvalho, who was the first of many guides I met on my weeklong trip. As we drove to the tranquil Baía das Caraúbas hotel, about an hour and a half away, Carvalho explained that no one fishes anymore, food prices are out of reach for local families, and the town’s most popular site, the Sunset Dune, has shrunk from a soaring 200 feet in the 1970s to just 20 feet under the footfall of visitors. For the rest of my time on the northern Brazilian coast, virtually everyone I spoke to cited Jericoacoara as a cautionary tale.

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Leaving Baía das Caraúbas, a dreamy cluster of bungalows on a stretch of virgin beach, I drove west with Carvalho and Marta Tucci, who photographed this story, toward the bustling kitesurfing town of Barra Grande before continuing on to the expansive Parnaíba River Delta. From there, it took the better part of a day to navigate a labyrinth of distributaries and mangroves by boat. Capuchin monkeys patrolled the canopy, which climbed as high as 130 feet, and crabs the color of traffic cones scuttled over roots.

For lunch, we stopped at a simple family restaurant owned by Raimundo Aires, a fisherman and boatbuilder who started selling food to the occasional visitor more than 20 years ago. Across the river, a low mantle of vegetation grew along the shore — a new sandbank, Aires explained, creeping closer each year. I asked what he planned to do when boats could no longer get to his restaurant. “We don’t worry about those things around here,” he said, with a laugh and a shrug. “It’s just nature.”

On a drive later that evening, we raced the rising tide along a lonely stretch of coast under the silent watch of wind turbines. As the Preguiças River, an important source of the sediments that form the Lençóis, sidled up from the south, the beach narrowed to a spit of sand studded with beach shacks, half-buried in the shifting dunes. Until the road opened access to Atins, a short boat ride across the river, this place, called Caburé, had been a popular beach town. Today, it’s hardly on the tourist radar at all.

Finally, after three days of near-constant transit, we arrived at La Ferme de Georges, in Atins. I spent the better part of the next morning reading in a hammock under a pergola of wild cashew trees outside my private bungalow. Later I visited La Ferme’s exuberant kitchen garden, tended for the past decade or so by Osmar Amorim, who first came to Atins 30 years ago. Amorim has seen this village of barely 100 households, almost all of them dedicated to fishing, transform into a beach town that lives on tourism. Many neighbors sold their land early on; others have built rental rooms in their gardens, abandoning the traditional agricultural techniques that Amorim conserves in his garden. It’s hard work, he said, “but I get to live in a way that brings me joy.”

After lunch, which included a glorious tangle of Amorim’s garden greens, I took a short walk to La Ferme’s newly opened beach house, a breezy pavilion sheltered by coconut palms a few steps from the sea. That afternoon, a group of local kids from a free day-care program called Peixinhos da Areia, which translates to Little Sand Fishes, had gathered around a picnic table to bead bracelets and mold figurines out of salt dough. Their presence made for a refreshing break from the usual barricade that luxury hotels erect between locals and guests. By next year, La Ferme intends to build the Peixinhos a permanent space alongside the beach house. Tourism may have changed Atins, but at the hotel, the feeling of a village persisted.

But even Atins, with its broad, quiet beach, its slow pace and fast tides, was really just a prelude—“the back door to the Lençóis,” as Rafael Carvalho, a biologist turned guide, told me the next morning en route to the park. Before moving to Atins in 2019, Carvalho, originally from São Luís, had studied soil health and small-scale agriculture in the Amazon, but radical reductions to scientific research under the right-wing administration of Jair Bolsonaro had driven him from the field. We linked up with Souza, and for the next three days of our trip, Carvalho served as both a waggish foil to Souza’s unflappable calm and as an unusually clear-headed commentator on how conservation and tourism have reshaped the region, for better and for worse.

The park itself, he explained, was not entirely positive for the people living within its boundaries, most of them descendants of settlers who arrived in the 19th century fleeing droughts in the arid interior. When Brazil’s military dictatorship established the park in 1981, it took as its model the National Park Service of the United States, which, since its founding in 1916, has treated conservation areas as pristine, sacrosanct wilderness, and a convenient means of erasing the Native histories in those landscapes. In the Lençóis, most families had no idea they lived on protected land until authorities came to inform them of the new restrictions on their way of life, particularly on the agricultural practices that had sustained them for 150 years. Though people continue to live in the park, authorities tellingly call the area “the Primitive Zone.” As Carvalho told me: “It’s ironic that they call it primitive, when it’s the government that insists on keeping it that way.”

After a long day of travel by road and by boat, we arrived at Oiá, a hotel at the edge of Santo Amaro. Oiá’s founder, São Paulo–based interior designer Marina Linhares, first took note of the area in 2019 because of the 700,000 Heures pop-up. She immediately fell in love with the windswept coast and, when the 700,000 Heures residency ended, purchased the property with her husband, Tomas Perez. Reworking it as a permanent hotel, they wrapped the main house in a deep veranda, built a pair of bungalows out back, and filled the interiors with works by artists from the northeast of the country and furniture by luminaries of 20th-century Brazilian design. It opened in May 2023.

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After a restful night in a guest room in the main house, I awoke to a dazzling breakfast of fresh fruit and just-baked bread served under the canopy of a towering angelim tree. Soon enough, I was lazing down the Rio Alegre in a kayak, drifting over its slow, translucent waters, which were stained vermilion by iron oxide in the surrounding soil. For the hour after that, we heaved over rolling dunes — lower on this side of the park, serpentine rather than parabolic, the same materials molded into an entirely different form — in the open back of a 4 x 4. The dunes eventually kneeled to the Atlantic, stretching out as a broad, empty beach pierced with totems of petrified tree trunks. It looked like the edge of the earth. Beyond that, past the dunes and past the beach but still within the park’s boundaries, we arrived in the fishing village of Travosa. With its humble brick houses scattered along a narrow dirt track, I imagined Travosa looked the way Atins did 30 years ago.

We settled for lunch at Toca da Guaajá, a modest family restaurant named for the scarlet ibises that flit down the coast like twigs of coral heaved into the wind. Seated under a high, thatched pavilion surrounded by palm trees, we faced the tidal channel where Travosa’s fishermen beach their boats and where women gather at low tide to sift tiny clams, called sarnambi, from the sand. As the hottest hours slouched by, I feasted on wild mangrove oysters lashed with fresh-pressed coconut milk and medallions of basil. Morsels of sarnambi, smaller than pennies and faintly briny, came stuffed in a grilled sea bass and stewed with coconut. For dessert, my host, Alcione Galvão, served a thick pudding of shaved coconut cooked down with cream and condensed milk, crowned with fragrant amulets of lemon verbena. It was the best meal I ate all week.

Afterward, I spoke with Galvão about life in Travosa, which, on our way in, had seemed like a ghost town: not a door open, not a light on, not even the tinny rattle of a radio. “Even though you didn’t see anyone in the street — it’s mid-afternoon, everyone is at home, out of the sun — everyone knows you’re here,” Galvão told me with an indulgent smile; after all, no place, or almost no place, is actually empty. “Life in Travosa is very precarious,” she went on. “We don’t have basic infrastructure for health or education. If we could open things to tourism, all of that might change.” She paused for a moment. “We’ve been here longer than the park. We’d like to create new opportunities.” It was an optimistic view of tourism, which, as I’d seen that week, can create livelihoods, but also has the power to displace families and traditional ways of life. In Travosa, though, it still represents hope.

Days before that lunch in Travosa, I’d passed my first night in the Lençóis in the simple but immaculate home of Souza’s in-laws, Raimundo Garcia dos Santos and Maria da Silva Lira, who offer accommodations in the hamlet of Baixa Grande. We watched the sunset from the ridge of a high dune, the thin sliver of the Atlantic flashing across the horizon like a wayward firework, then continued on to the thatched-roof house where Souza’s wife had grown up. Surrounded by rustling carnauba palms and reflected in a pond as still as a mirror, the scene was a storybook picture of a desert mirage.

Seated around the kitchen table, María told us about moving to Santo Amaro to find work, which was scarce back home in the oasis. Shortly after, she met Souza while washing clothes on the banks of the Rio Alegre. She told us, too, about their first trip to Baixa Grande: a 12-hour bike ride across the dunes. (“Halfway through he asked if we were close and I told him ‘Yes!’ ” she recalled with a huge laugh. “We kept that game going for the next six hours!”) Three years ago, they finally moved back to Baixa Grande and took their first clients into the dunes together.

Souza remembers that first trip fondly. “The simplicity of the way of life here really made an impression on me,” he told me the following morning, as we scaled a young dune that had recently appeared alongside his in-laws’ house. With the oasis behind us, we walked east into the wind. A glimmer of sand smudged the distant dunes into a lavender sky. “What I really loved was how humble people were,” he went on, “how much they looked after each other.”

After a night in Baixa Grande, eating and laughing like members of Souza’s family, it was clear that, whatever else has shifted in the Lençóis, the generosity and warmth of its people has not been diminished. For me, it was proof that humanity can thrive, even in the least likely of places.

A version of this story first appeared in the February 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline "Into the Blue."

Read the original article on Travel & Leisure