Caburé
"Caburé is barely wide enough to have two sides, and each one shows you a completely different Brazil."
A sliver of sand village between the ocean and the Preguiças river, reached only by boat, where cashew trees grow sideways and the sunset show has no audience competition.
Caburé is a strange piece of geography before it’s anything else: a narrow strip of sand, in places no more than a couple hundred meters wide, with the calm water of the Rio Preguiças on one side and the open Atlantic pounding the other. You reach it only by boat, a forty-minute run downriver from Barreirinhas past mangrove banks and the occasional fisherman working a cast net alone in the current.
A Village With Two Different Waters
What struck me first was how differently the two shorelines behaved. The river side is glassy and warm, boats moored in a neat row, kids swimming right off the wooden jetties in front of the village’s handful of pousadas. Walk five minutes across the sand spit, past cashew trees bent almost horizontal by decades of onshore wind, and you’re suddenly facing genuine surf — a wide, wild Atlantic beach with almost nobody on it, the sound of the waves loud enough that you can’t hear the river side at all anymore.
We spent one full day just alternating — an hour floating in the calm river shallows, then a walk across to the ocean side to let actual waves knock us around, back and forth, until neither of us could remember which side we’d started on. It’s a small enough village that this loop takes no real planning. You just walk toward whichever sound you feel like hearing.
Cashew Wine and an Uncontested Sunset
Caburé’s other quiet specialty is cajuína, a sweet, faintly tannic drink made from clarified cashew apple juice, sold cold in glass bottles by nearly every small kitchen in the village. We drank it with a dinner of grilled fish at a table set directly on the sand, river side, as the light went from white to gold to a deep pink that the water picked up and held for what felt like twenty unhurried minutes. There is no competing crowd for the sunset here the way there is at Jeri’s dune — just the village’s own residents and the handful of visitors who’d made the boat trip, all facing the same direction without saying much.
When to go: July through December for reliable dry-season weather and calmer river crossings from Barreirinhas. Outside those months, check with your boat operator — heavy rain can make the river run choppier than the short distance suggests.