Jijoca de Jericoacoara travel guide

Frolick on the beach

Jericoacoara is another of the northeast’s paradise beaches that is getting spoilt. Up until the 1980s it was a magical place: a collection of little fishermen’s shacks lost under towering dunes and surrounded by wonderful long, sweeping beaches. São Paulo middle-class hippies used to live here for months, surfing, dancing forró and smoking copious amounts of weed. Slowly Jeri began to grow. Then buggies began to race up and down the dunes – including the most delicate, those with fixed vegetation – and local villages started to become tourist attractions. In the 1980s, the Italians discovered Jeri and building began, much of it with little or no environmental considerations; buggies whizzed up and down from dawn to dusk like a plague of motorized flies. Today, few properties or tourism businesses are locally owned and the fishermen and their families are being sidelined and priced out of town.

That said, Jeri remains beautiful and it has a long way to go before it becomes as spoilt as Morro de São Paulo or even Cumbuco. If careful choices are made by tourists (such as supporting local businesses, trying to speak Portuguese, participating in Brazilian culture and avoiding buggy tours and large European-run beachfront resorts), it could turn itself into an inspiring sustainable, small-scale resort . The nearby beaches offer superb conditions for kitesurfing and windsurfing – both practices that do little to damage the environment – and there is excellent walking and cycling along the long flat beaches to beauty spots like the crumbling chocolate-coloured rock arch at Pedra Furada. Sandboarding is popular and watching the sunset from the top of the large dune just west of town, followed by a display of capoeira on the beach, is a tradition among visitors.