Twenty-one volcanic islands and islets 354 km off the Brazilian coast, the main one only 18.4 square kilometres, with about 3,167 people on it. Seventy percent of the area became a marine national park in 1988 and UNESCO listed it in 2001, because this is where tuna, sharks, turtles and marine mammals come to feed in an ocean that is mostly empty around it. Spinner dolphins are here in numbers and humpbacks pass through. There are two birds found nowhere else, the Noronha elaenia and the Noronha vireo. Baía do Sancho is regularly called the best beach in the world, which for once is not marketing, and the island keeps it that way by being hard to get to and by charging to be there: you fly in from Recife or Natal, and there is an environmental fee that rises with the number of nights you stay. Administered by Pernambuco.
Pernambuco, Brazil
See it on the map
