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Lençóis Maranhenses: An amazing desert full of water

The only desert in Brasil, Lençóis has an impressive landscape made up of lakes and immense dunes

Words by Gabriel Silvestre
featured on JungleDrums issue 33 March 2006

When I started to read up on the Lençóis Maranhenses National Park, I became very confused. Starting with the name of the place, which for me conjures up an image of rolling hills and valleys crisscrossed by rivers and inhabited by wild animals. Nothing could be further from the truth. The park is in fact a desert, the only one in Brasil. Alright then, it must be inhospitable and arid, I thought. But the books informed me that, in Lençóis, it rains about 1,600mm per year, 320 times more than in the Sahara, and there are thousands of oases. So, you know what? I gave up trying to understand, packed my bags and went to see it for myself.

The easiest way to get to the Park is to set out from São Luís, the capital of Maranhão, and drive 260km to a city called Barreirinhas via the recently-constructed motorway that has cut down the time it takes to get to the park. The Lençóis Maranhenses National Park was set aside by federal law in 1981, and takes up an area the size of the district of São Paulo. Frozen in time, the region had a brief boom at the beginning of the `70s when Petrobras started prospecting for oil (without much success) beneath the sandy terrain. But, since the region’s major treasure has always been its surreal beauty, tourism took off in the `90s and today is the driving economic force in the area.