Fernando de Noronha

Antoine's view

Brazil is a beautiful country, thriving with breathtaking landscapes, rich in music with a variety of traditions.
Its only drawback: are the many rivers which cloud the water of its shores, and nowhere can we find the crystal clearwater of the Caribbean and other archipels?

The Fernando de Noronha island situated North-East of the cap Sao Roque, on the extreme north-eastern part of the South American continent, is able to offer perfectly clear water, due to its distance from the mainland? Many divers from Brazil and the rest of the world come mainly to discover the protected flora and fauna that the small group of islands has to offer, dominated by its characteristic jutting rock called the ?Morro do pico? it is a taste of what is to come in the bay of Rio de Janeiro - which is home to one of the largest colonies in the world of ?Spinner? dolphins thus named because they perform spectacular leaps from the water while rotating around their longitudinal axis up to seven times.

Near to the continent, I visited again the beautiful island of Itaparica, off the town of El Salvador (or Bahia), the capital of Brazilian Nordeste;
it is an island where I spent long weeks onboard my second boat, the small sloop Voyage, steering the bow of the sloop - in coastline rich in vegetation, which is only to be found in the south-west of the island - right up to the small waterfall that tumbles from the cliff, to fill my tanks with freshwater before leaving to discoverer the nearby rivers, Rio Jaguaripe or the river of Nazaré, to small pretty ports, where we loaded our bags with delicious mangoes you can only find in Brazil.