01The place
The cove was sheltering boats long before anyone thought of summer holidays.
Balneário Piçarras lies on the northern coast of Santa Catarina, between Penha and Barra Velha. Its beach follows the Itapocorói cove, which the headland at Penha shields from the southerly and south-easterly swell. Hence the sheltered sea, a rare thing on an open coast.
The Piçarras river reaches the sea between two breakwaters and marks the boundary with Penha. At the mouth of the cove, close to the headland, sits Ilha Feia. Behind the shore rise hills of Atlantic Forest.
Its history belongs to the sea. In 1777 a whaling station was set up at Itapocorói, the nucleus from which Penha and Piçarras grew; the eighteenth-century chapel of São João Batista still stands there. Piçarras was a district of Penha until 1963. The name, in the usual account, comes from piçarro, the clayey sediment beneath the ground.
Praia do Trapiche, Penha, SC
02Why here
Because here the sea consents.
One walks into the water without asking leave of the waves. One walks the whole beach and comes back the same way, which is no longer the same.
Some come only once the town has emptied. They do not say why.
03Images
From the river mouth to the headland at Penha.
04What one does here
Verbs, not a programme.
Walk
The beach from end to end, with the cove alongside.
Swim
In a sea that lets you.
Sail
Out to Ilha Feia, or only as far as one cares to go.
Watch
The fishing boats of Penha, across the river.
Stay
Doing nothing is also a verb.
05The region
Penha, across the river.
Across the river is Penha. Armação do Itapocorói keeps the chapel of São João Batista and the boats of its small-scale fishermen.
It was in this cove, in 1985, that Santa Catarina began to farm mussels. To the north, Barra Velha.
Those who know return once the town has emptied.
Balneário Piçarras · Santa Catarina
06The other places
