Saquarema

I heard about Saquarema before I ever intended to go there, in the way you hear about a restaurant three separate people recommend without knowing each other. A surf instructor in Ipanema, a taxi driver, and a bartender in Búzios all mentioned it in the same week, always with the same reverence in their voice, always pointing east along the coast. Lia and I finally made the drive from Rio on a Thursday morning, past Saquarema’s own lagoon glinting under a flat sky, and understood within ten minutes of standing on the sand why the sport’s entire Brazilian circuit orbits this town.

Praia de Itauna and the Chapel

The wave breaks directly beneath a small white chapel — Nossa Senhora de Nazaré — perched on a rocky outcrop that splits Itaúna beach in two. It is a strange and beautiful composition: devotion and adrenaline sharing the same square meter of coastline. The WSL circuit and Brazil’s national championships have run here for decades, and on a good swell day the lineup fills with a density of talent that made me feel faintly ridiculous for having brought my own board.

We watched a heat from the rocks with a crowd of locals who called out scores before the judges’ tower lit up, an entire town fluent in a sport most countries treat as a niche. Between sets, older men sold coconuts from a cart parked in the chapel’s shadow, unbothered by the roar whenever someone dropped into a barrel.

The Lagoon Side

Saquarema is really two towns fused at the hip — the ocean-facing surf strip, and the quieter lagoon side where fishermen still pull nets by hand each morning. We rented bikes and rode the loop road around Lagoa de Saquarema at dusk, egrets lifting off the shallows in long unhurried lines, the water turning the same pink as the sky. Lia stopped to buy grilled cheese from a woman working a coal brazier at the water’s edge, and we ate it sitting on a low wall, watching fishing boats come in for the evening.

Why It Stays Under the Radar

Unlike Búzios or Arraial do Cabo, Saquarema has almost no international tourist infrastructure — a handful of pousadas, surf camps that cater mostly to Brazilians and Argentines, and a main street of juice bars and board shapers rather than boutiques. That absence is the point. This is a working surf town first, a destination second, and it wears that order of priorities on every corner.

When to go: May to September brings the biggest, most consistent south swells and the competition season. December to February is calmer water, warmer air, and better for beginners.