Jijoca de Jericoacoara
"Jijoca is the last town with a paved road, and it knows exactly what that makes it."
The unglamorous municipal town you pass through — and the buggy staging ground — before the forty-minute dune crossing into Jeri itself.
Nobody writes about Jijoca. Every account of getting to Jericoacoara treats it as a blur — the airport shuttle, the bus from Fortaleza, the last gas station before the dunes swallow the road — and then jumps straight to the beach village on the other side. Having now spent a full day there by accident, waiting out a buggy breakdown, I think that’s a disservice. Jijoca is the actual municipality that Jericoacoara belongs to, and it does something the beach village, for all its charm, no longer really does: it functions as an ordinary Ceará town.
The Staging Ground
The town’s entire identity now orbits its role as gatekeeper to Jeri. The main square is lined with buggy operators, their vehicles nose-in against the curb in a row that runs the length of the block, drivers calling out prices and haggling in the specific rhythm of people who’ve done this ten times before lunch. We’d arrived by bus from Fortaleza and had planned only a quick transfer, but the buggy we’d booked had a mechanical problem, and the two-hour delay that followed turned into an accidental tour of a town most visitors never register as a place at all.
An Ordinary Town Doing Its Own Thing
Away from the buggy square, Jijoca has a produce market, a school letting out at the same hour we walked past it, and a lagoon — Lagoa da Torta — on its outskirts that locals swim in without the tourist crowds that pack Jeri’s better-known lagoons an hour’s buggy ride away. We ate lunch at a small lanchonete where the owner, hearing we were headed to Jeri, gave us a rundown of which buggy drivers were reliable and which ones drove too fast on the dune crossing — information no guidebook had offered us and that turned out to be entirely accurate.
The crossing itself, once the buggy was finally fixed, took the promised forty minutes — open dune the whole way, the last paved road of the trip disappearing behind us within the first five minutes. Having seen Jijoca first, on its own unhurried terms, made arriving in Jeri feel less like stepping into a postcard and more like completing a journey that had actually started somewhere real.
When to go: Any time you’re heading to Jericoacoara — Jijoca is the necessary first stop. July through December brings the dry season and the smoothest buggy crossings; roads can turn to mud in the rainy months of February through May.