Sunday, January 25, 2009

Praia do Gunga, one of my favourites places on earth

Maceio has several beautiful beaches, I decided to start with my favourite place. It is Praia do Gunga.

Praia do Gunga is located about 20 miles south of Maceio. You can get there by boat from Barra de Sao Miguel or by car driving through a private property to get to the beach.

It is really hard to describe this place in words. I selected few pictures to show how it looks like.


This first picture shows how this beach looks like. From this picture you can see that this beach is surrounded by palm trees.



This second picture shows the other side of the beach. Using google map you can get a better view from the top of this unique place below.


View Larger Map

Besides the natural beauty of the place, I like Praia do Gunga for its magic energy. There is something about the energy in this place that makes you feel good the minute you get there. I know this is very subjective but this is the best way to describe the what you feel there. If you spend a day there you will probably leave the place free of any worries and feeling that your batteries are fully recharged.

Please note that this is a very primitive beach with a fraction of infrastructure and service that you will find in any other beach in Maceio. Also, there has been some recent tourism expansion and sometimes you may find this place a bit crowded. So, service that has never been stellar can get even a bit worse than normal on those days. Despite those recent changes, it is still one of my favourites places on earth.

There are couple things to do there if you are not into just sun bathing like myself. You can go for a long walk, I am not sure but you can easily walk probably couple miles from one extreme of the beach to the other. There are some boat trips from the beach to a nearby ´natural aquarium` or nearby beach, Barra de Sao Miguel. You can also rent a kayak and stop at one of the sand banks in the middle of the lake in front of the beach.

Anyway, no matter what you decide to do there, the energy of the place simply embraces you and you forget about everything.

Why this blog

This blog is about the city of Maceio, a small town in the Northeast of Brazil and capital of the state of Alagoas.




My objective with this blog is to share a little bit of my knowledge about Maceio and close by cities in the same state of Alagoas.
Chances are that you never heard about Maceio unless you have done some extensive travel in the Northeast of Brazil or know somebody from Brazil. Most foreign tourists are familiar with Rio de Janeiro (famous for its Carnival parties and beaches) or Sao Paulo (largest and major business city in Brazil). In my opinion Maceio is an unknown paradise with unparallel natural beauties.

I certainly have a biased view of the city, Maceio is my wife´s hometown and I am also from Brazil. However, I have been living in US for the past twelve years and I am actually originally from Sao Paulo. Arguably, I can say that I have an outsider perspective of the city.

Please note that I am not part of any tourism company and I am definitely not part of any brazilian city or state agency. I was fortunate to visit dozens of time this beautiful place. Also, I had the opportunity to spend sometimes weeks there.

Thanks to these travels (and certainly my wife, her relatives, and her local friends) I had the chance to travel a lot there and get to know the best in the area. By the way, as I write this first post in my blog, I am currently on vacation in Maceio.