It looks like the Sahara with swimming pools in it and it is not a desert at all. Some 155,000 hectares of white dunes behind 70 km of Atlantic coast, and from January to June the rains fill the valleys between the dunes with clear freshwater lagoons, up to 100 metres long and three metres deep, covering about 41 percent of the park. They hold because there is an impermeable rock layer under the sand that stops the water draining away. The reason it is not a desert is simple arithmetic: it gets around 1,200 mm of rain a year and the threshold for a desert is 250, with about 70 percent of it falling January to May. There are fish in them, including a wolf fish that digs down into the wet mud and sleeps through the dry season, because in the dry the pools drop as much as a metre a month. UNESCO World Heritage as of July 2024. Maranhão.
Maranhão, Brazil
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