Lençóis Maranhenses National Park
Parque Nacional dos Lençóis Maranhenses
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Interesting facts
- The sand is carried to the coast by the Parnaíba and Preguiças rivers, then pushed back inland by the wind as far as 50 kilometres.
- Dunes in the park reach about 40 metres high, and the lagoons between them can stretch up to 100 metres long and 3 metres deep.
- The lagoon water warms to between about 27 and 32 °C, and in the dry season the pools lose roughly a metre of depth each month.
- In the rainy season the lagoons cover around 41 percent of the park's area of some 155,000 hectares.
- Endangered animals living in the park include the scarlet ibis, the West Indian manatee, the neotropical otter and the oncilla, a small wild cat.
- The dunes served as a backdrop for the Brazilian film House of Sand and for scenes in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.
- Annual temperatures barely vary, by only about one degree Celsius, while some 70 percent of the rain falls between January and May.
Why it is worth it
Lençóis Maranhenses means "bedsheets of Maranhão" — the name comes straight from the shape of the dunes, whose parallel ridges look like a tangle of linens left out to dry. That image already hints at the park's real trick: this looks like a desert, but it isn't one. Rain falls here in real quantities, more than a metre a year, and between January and June it collects in the valleys between the dunes to form thousands of turquoise freshwater lagoons. By December most of them have evaporated or drained into the sand, and the cycle starts again.
The genuinely strange part is what lives in those lagoons. Visitors have long asked how fish end up in pools sitting on top of pure white sand, far from any river mouth — and the answer isn't that birds carry in eggs, as the popular story goes. Some lagoons connect underground to permanent waterways, letting fish move in once the water rises. But others hold onto life through the dry months in place: the trahira, a toothy predator, burrows into damp mud and goes dormant until the rains return, while smaller species lay eggs directly in the wet sand before the pools disappear, leaving the next generation to hatch on cue. It's less a desert with fish in it than a wetland that spends half the year in disguise.
UNESCO added the park to the World Heritage list in 2024, more than four decades after Brazil created it in 1981, citing both the dune-lagoon geology and a documented count of over 850 species living within it — turtles, migratory birds, and the fish that never actually leave.
Best time to visit
June through September, when the lagoons are at their fullest after the rainy season and before the long dry spell drains them.
Getting there
34 km from Primeira Cruz. Marechal Cunha Machado International Airport (SLZ) is about 123 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Lençóis Maranhenses National Park is a national park in Maranhão state in northeastern Brazil, just east of the Baía de São José. Protected on June 2, 1981, the 155,000 ha (380,000-acre) park includes 70 km (43 mi) of coastline, and an interior composed of rolling sand dunes. During the rainy season, the valleys among the dunes fill with freshwater lagoons, prevented from draining by the impermeable rock beneath. The park is home to a range of species, including four listed as endangered, and has become a popular destination for ecotourists.
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