Fernando de Noronha is a cluster of twenty-one volcanic islands 350 kilometres off the northeast coast of Brazil, with a beach voted the best in the world more than once and a bay that hundreds of spinner dolphins enter every dawn. The beach is Baía do Sancho, a crescent of golden sand under cliffs, reached by climbing down a staircase and a ladder pinned into a cleft in the rock, with water so clear that the reef shows from the top of the cliff. The dolphins come to Baía dos Golfinhos, a bay closed to swimmers, after hunting all night in deep water offshore; from the lookout above it before sunrise you watch them stream in, the water busy with fins and the odd leap, to rest, mate and shelter their young from sharks. Green turtles come ashore after dark from December to June to bury their eggs, mostly on the wild open-ocean sand of Praia do Leão, and the hatchlings are escorted to the sea.
The islands are the tips of a volcano rising from the ocean floor, and the water around them is the point. Diving here is into visibility of forty metres and more, along volcanic walls and over the reef, with sharks, rays and turtles in numbers found nowhere else on the Brazilian coast; at the Atalaia tidal pool, snorkelling is limited to a few people at a time and a few minutes each. A boat round the archipelago passes Morro do Pico, the volcanic spike that is the island's landmark, and the twin rocks of Dois Irmãos, the two brothers, to coves that no road reaches. At sunset the crowd gathers at the ruined Boldró fort as the sun goes down beside the Dois Irmãos and lights the cliffs. For most of its history Noronha was a prison, from 1737 until 1942, which is why it was never built up; today visitor numbers are capped and a daily tax is charged to keep it that way. Noronha is Brazil's best beach at the end of a ladder, and the dolphins arrive on time.