Brazil's northeast coast has two beaches regularly named among the country's most beautiful — and both are protected by law, but for almost opposite reasons, with almost opposite rules. One sits inside an archipelago turned marine park in 1988 and funded by a daily conservation fee. The other is a sea of shifting dunes that Brazilian law protects for its landscape and wind, not its reef. Comparing the two — Praia do Sancho, in Fernando de Noronha, and Praia de Jericoacoara, in Ceará — says a lot about how Brazil decides what's worth protecting, and how.
Praia do Sancho sits in the Fernando de Noronha archipelago, off the coast of Pernambuco state. On 14 September 1988, the Brazilian government created the Fernando de Noronha Marine National Park, which today covers 10,927.64 hectares of land and sea — according to the English Wikipedia, roughly 70% of the archipelago's total area. In 2001, UNESCO listed the archipelago, together with Atol das Rocas, as a World Heritage Site under the designation "Brazilian Atlantic Islands: Fernando de Noronha and Atol das Rocas Reserves."
Visiting comes with a direct cost tied to that protection: every visitor pays the Taxa de Preservação Ambiental (TPA), an environmental preservation tax that, as of 2022, was set at R$87.21 per person, per day (rates are adjusted periodically, so it's worth checking the current figure before you travel). This tax is separate from the PANAMAR ticket, required on top of it to access most of the park's tourist sites — Praia do Sancho included.
A few minutes from Praia do Sancho is Baía dos Golfinhos (Dolphin Bay), described as the most consistent observation site on the planet for the spinner dolphin (Stenella longirostris), which gathers there daily. Since 1990, the Projeto Golfinho Rotador (Spinner Dolphin Project) has tracked this population, coordinated by the Centro Golfinho Rotador and sponsored by Petrobras — more than three decades of continuous data on the same species, in the same place. The protection isn't just symbolic: between January and June, boats are banned from anchoring near the bay between 6pm and 6am, and submerged fishing is prohibited nearby year-round.
On the other side of Brazil's northeast, on the coast of Ceará state, Praia de Jericoacoara has a very different protection story. The area began as a state environmental protection zone, created on 29 October 1984 covering 8,416 hectares. It only became the federally managed Jericoacoara National Park, run by ICMBio, on 4 February 2002, and was expanded again in September 2005 with another 207 hectares, bringing the total to roughly 8,850 hectares. Its name comes from Tupi and, per documented sources, means "turtle burrow" — a hint that land wildlife and dunes, not a coral reef, were always the point.
It's exactly that landscape of shifting dunes, paired with consistent trade winds, that makes Jericoacoara a destination noted for having "favorable conditions for windsurfing and sandboarding." Unlike Fernando de Noronha, there's no daily conservation fee equivalent to the TPA — entering the village or the park carries no such direct per-visitor cost. The municipality of Jijoca de Jericoacoara was only founded on 6 May 1991, and the local airport — which made the village far easier to reach — didn't open until 2017.
In practice, that adds up to two very different versions of a "protected beach." At Sancho, protection is mostly marine and paid for directly by visitors through the TPA and PANAMAR, with specific rules built around species like the spinner dolphin. At Jericoacoara, protection was created to preserve dunes and a coastal land ecosystem, with no equivalent visitor fee, and it's the wind — not the reef — that keeps drawing people there. Neither beach is "more protected" than the other; they're simply two different answers to the same question: what's worth preserving, and how do you make that pay for itself.
Yes. Every visitor to Fernando de Noronha pays the Taxa de Preservação Ambiental (TPA), which as of 2022 was R$87.21 per person per day, plus a separate PANAMAR ticket required to access most beaches and attractions inside the marine park.
There's no daily conservation fee equivalent to Fernando de Noronha's TPA. Jericoacoara has been protected as a national park since 2002 for its dunes and coastal ecosystem, not for a marine reef.
Because it combines extensive shifting dunes with consistent trade winds year-round — the same conditions that led to the creation of the national park now protecting the area.
Picked by the editorial team.
