Jericoacoara has sand for streets and no streetlights, because night lighting is banned here by local law. The village had no electricity at all until 1998, and after dark the lanes are lit by the moon and the stars and not much else. It sits among the dunes of Ceará, on Brazil's near-equatorial north coast, and there is no road in. The pavement ends at Jijoca, and the last stretch is a 45-minute lurch across open sand in a 4x4. Wind is what made the place: steady trade winds come off the Atlantic almost every day, piling white quartz sand into crescent dunes that creep slowly inland. The same wind made Jeri one of the world's kitesurfing capitals. Freshwater lagoons the colour of turquoise pool between the dunes.
The day ends the same way every evening. Hundreds climb the Duna do Pôr do Sol, the great dune beside the village, and when the sun drops into the Atlantic the crowd applauds. Along the shore, waves have bored a doorway clean through a wall of red rock — the Pedra Furada, the village's emblem, which you can reach on foot only at low tide. At the lagoons a 40-minute buggy ride south, beach bars hang hammocks out over water shallow and warm enough to sit in half-submerged. Those lagoons are fullest after the rains and shrink through the dry months. The trade winds that make the kiting also mean the sea is rarely flat and the sand is always moving. Because there are no streetlights, the nights belong to the sky, and the sand lanes go quiet early. Cars stay outside the village, nothing here hurries, and Jericoacoara teaches you to slow down.