Jericoacoara

Panorama of Jericoacoara taken from the hill just east of town.

The panorama in two parts....

View of the sunset dune from the point area.

There's a popular windsurfing center here that caters to visiting sailors from all
corners of the world who come here to take advantage of the steady winds.

In Jericoacoara horses are as popular as beach buggies.

Our home for over a month (100$/month),

located on a large property above praia Malhada.

50 cents per lobster, mmmmmmmmmm.

Lot's of horses, donkeys, dogs, cats, chickens & a son-of-a-bitch rooster
just asking for a painful demise, waking me up at dawn every day !

Mu & Carla, a traveling couple camping on the property
while selling their handmade art around town.

Time to move on, continuing their journey up the coast towards the Amazon.
They started in Bolivia a couple of years ago, since then bicycling thousands of km up the Brazilian coast,
(mostly riding on the beach itself) sustaining themselves with their artwork.

Click here to see what a talented person can do with a pair of pliers,
a piece of string and some surgical steel wire + raw materials found during the journey.

Sun sets on Jeri.

The beach is always full of action around sunset time,
be it football, volleyball, capoeira, horse riding, sailing, surfing or jogging.

The town is full of chic shops & restaurants.

Downtown.

The main square.

There are several luxury resorts around town.

I was surprised to see that some new construction is still taking place as Jeri is, to put it mildly,
extremely overbuilt with a tremendous overcapacity judging by all the empty pousadas all around town.
There must be well over a hundred pousadas here filled to about 10% of capacity even though it's supposed
to be high season (at least for sailing). I guess the reality has sunk in with some pousada owners as there
are lots of pousadas for sale all around town now, though most property sellers are still floating in the clouds
asking absurdly high prices for their lots, sometimes a million dollars or more !!!??
I guess everybody around here smokes a little too much weed (even the town's 4 cops are too high to do anything
about crime when it strikes, I'm told). To complete the picture there appears to be plenty of halfwit Europeans
willing to pay said prices as most of Jericoacoara seems to be owned by Europeans (mostly Italian).
I guess it takes a year or two for them to discover that one cannot pay a million for a property, build a guest house,
charge $10-20/night while having a 10% occupation rate and expect to get a reasonable return on investment.
Now their only way out is trying to find another halfwit European bagholder to sell their guest house to.
I decided against investing here mainly because of the extremely low ROI caused by the Jeri real estate "bubble"
(which is bound to pop at any moment) but also because unfortunately it is a lot more boring than I expected,
both on land and in the water. There are hundreds of sailing "paradises" along the Brazilian northeast coast that
to the untrained eye are identical to Jeri with roughly 10x cheaper land prices but they all suffer from the same problem,
they are extremely boooooring....plenty of wind but no waves and murky water & no mountains......DAAMN !

Sunset at the sunset dune.

Sandsurfing.

Local attractions; Lagoa azul & Pedra furada fotos.

Windsurfing

The sailing area at the "point" on a typical day.

The less crowded sailing beach "praia malhada" is a couple hundred yards east.
It's just as boring, though it has a "radical" reputation, hell knows why.

The scoop on Jeri sailing is that 90% of the time it is extremely boring, kinda
like sailing on a lake, or in "the Gorge". The winds are easterly trades that are probably turbo-boosted
by some kind of low pressure thermal effect from the Amazon, sucking in the cool Atlantic sea air and boosting
what should be otherwise weak winds at these latitudes into a hard sailable breeze along Brazil's entire tropical
coast around the equator to about 5 degrees south, an area that SHOULD be void of winds (equatorial doldrums).
Curiously there are no trades at all beyond 5 deg south ?!?!! Unfortunately Rio de Janeiro has no trades even though it's
on the same latitude as Hawaii (23 s) !? For some reason the South American "trades" disappear long before Rio latitude.
Must be some kind of continental interference, I guess, minus the thermal effect which is present along the Amazonian
coast... ?? In any case, there is NO lack of wind in Jeri, it is in fact VERY reliable, blowing hard n strong every day
without fault ! The problem is that the lack of waves and jumping opportunities are equally certain (as are crowds).
The reliably flat, waveless conditions on this coastline I figure must be due to the fact that any northern swell that
makes it this far south is not going to make it to shore because it will be destroyed by the shallow seas & heavy winds.
The beach is quite ugly in general (grey soft sand) & stinks like a swamp during low tide (most of the time).
At least the water is super warm, albeit murky & likely quite polluted due to all the town's raw sewage
being discharged untreated into the sea (as is the norm in Brazil).
Bottom line: It's a place I got tired of sailing at real quick.

Because of the extreme flatness of the topography and subsequently the super shallowness of the sea the sailing
area moves a couple hundred meters out or in depending on the tide (which probably is only a foot or two).
It seems the conditions are better during SUPER low tides when the wind can fill in ok at the "surf zone"
due to it being farther away from the "point" then.
It's the only time when good jumping and even some wave sailing can take place.
I only saw one such superfun day during the couple months I was there, the day before I left,
..... didn't get to sail.