Jericoacoara is a fishing village on the Ceará coast of northeast Brazil where the streets are sand and the trade wind turns up almost every afternoon from July to January. That wind is what brought the world here. A village with no paved road into it is now one of the kitesurfing capitals of the world. Beginners learn on the flat, shallow lagoons behind the dunes while stronger riders take the open sea, and by mid-afternoon the village has emptied onto the water. Jeri sits between a white sand sea and the Atlantic. The last stretch in is a lurch you make across open dunes by buggy or 4x4. Fame arrived in the 1990s, and the coast was already protected when it came. What it found is still what is here: low buildings, sand lanes, hammocks, fishing boats landing on the beach.
Every evening ends the same way. Hundreds climb the Duna do Pôr do Sol beside the village, and when the sun drops into the Atlantic the whole crest applauds, then slides back down in the last of the light. At low tide the beach walk leads to the Pedra Furada, a doorway the waves have bored clean through a wall of red rock, and the water decides when you can get to it. Buggies run out across the sand sea to the lagoons hidden in it, and about forty minutes south, at Lagoa do Paraíso, beach bars sling hammocks over water shallow and warm enough to sit in half-submerged. Those lagoons fill after the rains and shrink through the dry months, so the season decides which half of Jeri you get. The name is Tupi and means roughly the lair of the turtles, after the sea turtles that once dug their nests along these beaches. Streetlights are not allowed here at all. A few minutes past the last bar your eyes adjust, and the dunes come back under the stars.