The Northeast: Bahia and African Brazil

The best beaches in the Americas? They’re probably in Brazil’s northeast. Imagine the Caribbean as it used to be – half a century ago, expand it to a continental scale and you have the essence of this region. There are wild rivers filled with manatees, archipelagos of coral-fringed islands, beaches of powdery white, palm-shaded sand you could walk along all day without seeing more than a handful of people, huge rainforests and table-top mountains dripping with three-hundred-foot-high waterfalls.

The culture and food are superb. The states of Bahia and Pernambuco are South America’s African heart; especially in the capital cities of Salvador and Recife, which glitter with fabulous rococo churches and throb the heartbeat rhythms of giant drum orchestras playing the music of the Orixá Afro-Brazilian saints.

The Northeast is also home to South America’s newest Unesco World Heritage site – Lençois Maranhenses National Park, a vast dune desert pocked seasonally with emerald lakes, fringed with ibis-filled wetlands and lined with long, lonely beaches.