Poço Encantado

The difference between Poço Azul and Poço Encantado is the difference between participating and witnessing. Both are cave pools lit from below by refracted sunlight, both are in the same general area of the Chapada, both produce that particular shade of impossible turquoise that you photograph compulsively and which never quite comes out right. But at Poço Encantado you do not swim — the water is too deep, too cold, the ecosystem too fragile — and so instead you stand on a wooden walkway built above the pool and look down into it, and the effect is entirely different from anything you experience floating in the middle of it.

The approach is through a cave entrance — low, cool, the transition from outside warmth to inside chill happening within a few steps. The cave opens up quickly into a chamber of reasonable size, and the pool is below you, occupying most of the chamber floor. The light enters from a crack above and behind you, travels through the air, enters the water, and from the walkway you watch it do all of this as if through glass. The surface of the water is perfectly still — no wind reaches it here — and the light plays through it in a way that makes the depth look infinite, or at least uncountable.

I stood at the railing for twenty minutes, longer than most of the other visitors, and found myself doing something unusual: instead of photographing, I was simply watching. The light was moving — almost imperceptibly, but moving — as the sun tracked across the narrow crack above, and the quality of the blue shifted in response, deepening and then brightening in a cycle that felt like breathing. The guide, a young woman from a nearby village who had clearly explained this pool several hundred times, paused in the middle of her talk and watched it with me for a moment, not speaking. That silence was the best thing she said.

There is a particular quality that only the most unusual places have — the quality of making the people in them temporarily forget they are on a schedule. Poço Encantado has it absolutely. The group of Brazilian day-trippers who arrived just as I was leaving — twelve people, loud from the road, trailing children and water bottles — fell quiet within seconds of stepping onto the walkway. Two of the children lay down on the boards to get their faces closer to the railing and stare straight down into the water. The adults stood behind them and stared in the same direction without speaking.

The surrounding municipality of Itaetê is worth a stop: a small, quiet town with a market that operates on Friday mornings and a particular sweet made from local cashew nuts and raw sugar that I have never found anywhere else in the same form. The woman who makes them operates from a table in front of her house and sells out by noon.

When to go: The magic light window at Poço Encantado is similar to Poço Azul — roughly ten in the morning to two in the afternoon, with the peak between eleven and one. April through September gives the clearest water and best conditions. Visit midweek when possible; the cave is intimate and crowding diminishes the experience significantly.