Xingó Canyon
"The canyon opens around a bend and for a moment you forget that you are in the middle of the driest biome in Brazil."
The boat left Canindé de São Francisco just after seven in the morning, when the air still carried the cool of the previous night. We headed upriver into the gorge, and I sat at the prow watching the canyon walls build on either side of us. At first it was gradual — the banks rising, the scrub giving way to sheer sandstone, the colour of the stone shifting from ochre to rust to a deep burgundy as the morning light found different angles. Then the canyon bent to the left, the walls shot up to a hundred metres on both sides, and the São Francisco running between them turned a colour I did not expect: a clear, bright blue-green that looked borrowed from somewhere tropical.
The canyon exists because of the Xingó hydroelectric dam, completed in 1994, which flooded the original gorge and created the reservoir that now fills the lower sections of the canyon with that improbable water colour. Whether this makes it natural or artificial is a question I kept turning over — the walls were always there, and the canyon itself formed over millions of years, but the water that fills it is engineered. The effect, regardless, is genuinely extraordinary: xique-xique cacti growing from cracks in the vertical walls, their fat ribbed columns descending to the waterline; swallows nesting in the cliff faces at a height I could not estimate; in one narrow side gulch, a waterfall that drops maybe thirty metres into a pool the colour of a swimming pool advertisement.
The tour boats stop at several points where you can swim, and I did, and the water was cooler than the air by about fifteen degrees. The contrast with the landscape above — the dry, thorned, bleached caatinga stretching in every direction from the canyon rim — was almost hallucinatory. At one point I floated on my back and looked up at the strip of blue sky between the canyon walls and thought: this is what the biome keeps hidden. All that apparent desolation above ground, and then this — water so clear you can see your feet at three metres depth, the walls going up on both sides like the walls of a cathedral that someone forgot to finish.
When to go: Year-round, but April through September offers the clearest water and most stable weather. November through January brings rains and higher river levels that can muddy the water. Book boat tours from Canindé de São Francisco at least a day ahead during Brazilian holidays.