Brazilian dunes dotted with dazzling pools make UNESCO heritage list

SAO PAULO — Brazil’s Lencois Maranhenses National Park, famed for its white dunes that fill with blue and emerald lagoons in the rainy season, was on Friday declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The vast park, named for the dunes’ resemblance to a bedsheet spread across the landscape — “lencois” means sheets in Portuguese — is located in the northeastern state of Maranhao, in a transition zone between the Amazon, Cerrado, and Caatinga biomes.

The decision was taken during the 46th annual meeting of the United Nations World Heritage Committee, which is taking place in India’s capital New Delhi.

Lencois Maranhenses is the 24th site in Brazil to make it onto the list of places of significant cultural or natural significance.

The national park was created in June 1981 and covers an area of 156,000 hectares, more than half of which offers a landscape of dunes and multi-coloured lagoons, which attract more than 100,000 tourists each year.

According to UNESCO, it is the largest expanse of dunes in South America.

The Lencois Maranhenses are a protected area “where the desert meets the sea, creating a unique landscape,” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in a letter sent in early 2023 to UNESCO to urge the site’s inscription as a World Heritage Site.

The park has also hosted several Hollywood film shoots.