As a visitor sets eyes on the brilliant pools of paradise that characterize Brazil's Lençóis Maranhenses National Park for the first time, it wouldn't be out of line to assume hallucination.
Dazzling blue lagoons numbering in the thousands hide below towering sand dunes draped across 598 square miles. Every single one is inviting -- scratch that, begging! -- travelers to toil across the sand and hurl themselves into the beautiful abyss. At least one imagined version of heaven surely unfolds in a scene similar to this.
Another worthwhile add-on is the small village of Alcântara, located across the Sâo Marcos Bay from São Luis, a wonderfully cinematic step-back-in-time that's home to a melange of preserved, ruined and restored mansions, homes and churches laid out on artistic crisscrossed cobblestones. The village is also home to colonies of red ibis , which color the surrounds bright scarlet at sunrise.
Whether you enter the vast expanse on two feet or four wheels, you'll never have to worry about kicking up a face full of sand to anyone else around.A park all to yourself There are two isolated villages among the dunes. Caburé, 64 miles northeast of Barreirinhas, is little more than a sand peninsula between the river and the Atlantic ocean.