Photo of the month (March 2026 edition): Praia Dura
I already mentioned earlier, in the July 2024 edition, that Ubatuba is one of my favorite places in the world. There I wrote that “despite the similarity of the overall landscape [surrounded by green mountains with dense rainforest vegetation meeting the sea], each beach is unique.” On that occasion, I took a drone photograph of Puruba Beach, “one of the most emblematic in Ubatuba,” according to the person writing this.
The British magazine National Geographic Traveller, on the other hand, prefers Fazenda Beach, just 15 km from Puruba, for the same reasons: green mountains meeting the river and the sea. And I believe other publications have chosen other beaches for the same reasons as well. But in truth, searching for a “better” or more beautiful beach among the more than one hundred in the region is an impossible task, because even with frequent bad weather, the landscape never ceases to surprise.
After a week of intense rainfall at the end of February, many beaches in Ubatuba were reshaped by the volume of water. One of them was Dura Beach, where the Rio Escuro flows, home to one of the last large mangroves in the region. This beach, with its fine, firm sand—as its name suggests—is usually shaped by tidal action. But the rough sea during the cold front carved its lines along almost the entire length of the beach, in a way I had never seen before.
It is likely that this reshaping, especially in the Praia Dura area, will become a constant in the near future. At the end of February, in just 12 hours, Ubatuba received approximately the equivalent of its monthly average rainfall of 200 mm. In May of last year, Praia Dura received the same volume in 24 hours. In March 2024, it was nearly double that precipitation over 72 hours. A similar pattern also occurred in February 2023, showing how, each year, extreme rainfall (in a place where it already rains a lot) has been intensifying here.
What still cannot be said is whether this gradual increase is due to isolated events or caused by global climate change. If that is the case, I will be ready to document such transformation on a timescale never before imagined. But honestly, I would rather not have to do that. I prefer to keep searching for a “better” or more beautiful beach among the more than one hundred beaches in the region.