Morro Branco & Praia das Fontes
For Laurel’s birthday, her friends took us to Morro Branco and Praia das Fontes, two beaches about 50 miles from Fortaleza. They’d said we’d visit the beaches, and maybe ride around in a rented dune buggy for a while. It sounded nice, but nothing out of the ordinary. Which was the perfect expectation for what turned out to be a completely surprising day. Within a few square miles around these beaches was an unbelievable diversity of natural phenomena.
First, the sand. According to our guide, twelve different colors of sand naturally occur in the area. Of these, we saw red, black, orange, yellow, bluish grey, and traditional beige. Local artisans make incredibly detailed pictures in glass bottles out of these colors. Here’s how they dry the sand:
“Morro_Branco_Drying_Sand”
The contrast between the (predominantly red) sand and the (incredibly blue) water was stunning. My camera can’t do it justice:
“Morro_Branco_Contrast”
We hiked through the “labirinto,” a series of trails through a small natural canyon:
“Morro_Branco_Labirinto”
We then drove a couple of miles down the beaches in a dune buggy. There was a wall of sandscape that ran alongside us a few dozen meters from the water’s edge. The wall was dotted with grottos. You can see fresh water that flows through the grottos and runs out to the ocean:
“Fontes_Sandscape”
When we rounded the wall, we were in the dunes:
“Fontes_Dunes”
We clambered down a huge hill-sized sand dune. Some people rented wooden sleds and slid down. We closed out the drive at a small lake that emptied out into tiny rapids.
You have to understand that everything we saw took us completely by surprise. Outside of places like Yellowstone, I don’t think I’ve seen such a variety of natural phenomena in such a small area.
