The 'Almost Coast': Northern Brazil’s Forgotten Pointbreak Potential

As the Championship Tour shifts its focus to the Rio Pro next week, we found ourselves tracing Brazil’s 7,500 km coastline on Google Earth — and what we discovered in the country's north was surprising.

We've all heard the claim that Brazil has few pointbreaks, just a handful in the southern states, but is that really true?

We zoomed in to find out.

Arriving at the southern tip of Brazil, the coast begins as a long stretch of low-lying, open sandy beaches, formed along a coastal plain lagoon system. Approaching the border of Santa Catarina, the first basaltic headland appears at Tôrres — an old lava flow perched over sedimentary rock — and beside it lies Brazil’s southernmost pointbreak.

From there, it takes another 150 km of straight sandy beaches to reach the better-known pointbreaks of Santa Catarina, including the country’s most well-known.

Brazil's south coast features steep, verdant headlands and short rugged beaches. A marked contrast to the coastline in the country's north.(Eco Garopaba)

These breaks come alive when refracted southwesterly and southerly swells, generated by subtropical and extratropical cyclones in the South Atlantic, bend into the coast — typically associated with cold fronts and active storm systems moving off the continent.

From Santa Catarina, it's another 1,000 km north to Arpoador, the sand-bottomed point at the edge of Rio’s famous Ipanema Beach. Importantly, as you reach São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the coastline begins to kink and face more directly south into the dominant swell direction. This alignment improves consistency at the beachbreaks, yet sand-bottomed points tend to form where swell approaches at an angle, allowing it to sweep sand along the coast via longshore drift.

In Rio, this drift moves at only 20–30% of the rate seen on Queensland’s Gold Coast, and its steep beach profiles encourage waves to break quickly and close to shore.

The only other known points — at least officially — are in Brazil’s northeast, around Baía Formosa, the hometown of Italo Ferreira. But what lies north of there is where things get intriguing.

From Natal onwards, the coastline becomes increasingly suggestive. Strong longshore currents, generated by easterly trade winds and powerful tides, sweep vast deposits of fine and easily workable sand from east to west. These are occasionally interrupted by beachrock ledges and low sedimentary headlands, creating ideal setups for sand to accumulate and wrap around — forming long, peeling pointbreaks that look flawless from above.

Google Earth reveals many perfect setups of long peeling righthanders made of fine sand. The pattern unfolding similar to other classic sand-bottom regions: Queensland, Salina Cruz, Mozambique.

But there's a catch: swell. Or rather, the lack of it.

A ten pack of perfect points squeezed between three degrees of latitude from roughly Natal to São Luís. There are many more kinks, indents, and deviations in the coast, yet common to the whole region is a frustrating lack of swell.

While southeast Brazil benefits from solid southwest-to-southeast swell generated by South Atlantic lows, the northern coast lacks access to strong easterly or northeasterly swell that would otherwise power these pointbreaks.

Instead it receives smaller, short-period east swells from the trades - driven by the South Atlantic Subtropical High - and occasional northeast swells from distant North Atlantic storms between December and March — but these are poorly aimed and often too weak to make an impact.

Unlike Queensland, for example, which is also on a sandy, east-facing coast of similar latitude, Brazil’s northern coast doesn’t receive reliable tropical cyclone swell. In fact, the South Atlantic is notoriously quiet when it comes to cyclonic activity, with only one confirmed tropical cyclone in recorded history — Catarina in 2004.

Note that we've used the term cyclone as a catch-all phrase, as cyclones, hurricanes, and typhoons are all the same phenomena.

An important question is why, if every other tropical basin produces cyclonic activity, does the South Atlantic go without?

The answer to that question is a mix of limiting factors: cooler sea surface temperatures, a weaker Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) in this basin, and significant upper-level wind shear.

Tropical cyclones form when warm, moist air rises from the ocean surface, creating the instability needed to fuel storm development. This process typically begins when sea surface temperatures exceed a threshold of around 26.5°C. While the Western Pacific, Indian Ocean, and North Atlantic all have broad areas that regularly surpass this threshold, the South Atlantic does not.

Here, warm waters are more limited, confined mostly to a narrow band influenced by the southward extension of the North Brazil Current. Even where sea surface temperatures do rise above the necessary threshold, vertical wind shear is typically too strong.

Wind shear — which is the change in wind speed or direction with altitude — plays a critical role in tropical cyclone formation. Low shear allows moist air to rise vertically and organise around a central core. But in the South Atlantic, high vertical shear disrupts this process, displacing thunderstorms away from the centre and preventing the storm from intensifying — or even forming in the first place.

At top, areas in white denote areas of low wind shear, ideal for the formation of tropical cyclones. Note the belt linking Madagascar and northern Australia, plus the area of white in the Coral Sea that spawns so many of the East Coast's summer swell producers. Note also the lack of white in the South Atlantic. At bottom, a corresponding map of the Southern Hemisphere showing historical cyclone tracks.

Cyclones are also correlated to the location of the ITCZ, where convergent winds form a highly unstable zone. These instabilities form vortices that can merge and intensify into tropical cyclones. As the ITCZ remains locked north of the equator over the Atlantic (due to a complex interplay of ocean‑atmosphere feedbacks, continental geometry, and upwelling dynamics) it favours cyclone formation to the north, but not to the south.

This leaves base level southeast trade swell and infrequent long period north swell as the sole swell supply in Brazil's north.

Yet there's more unwelcome news: When swell does make it to the coast, it’s often mitigated by coral reefs that line areas of the outer continental shelf. These reefs can dissipate wave energy before it reaches the points — although rising sea levels may begin to change this dynamic in the future.

It’s a fascinating paradox: a coastline with textbook surf potential, but no consistent swell engine. A region that fires the imagination, where your mind's eye can see waves peeling down those many pointbreaks, yet the waves rarely materialise.

From a geomorphological perspective, this stretch of Brazil is ripe for exploration. It has the points, it has mobile sediment, it even has tropical water, but without a reliable swell source it rarely gets the chance to shine.

Though they block swell from hitting parts of the coast, those aforementioned offshore coral reefs go alright when the swell does fire. Above, Ademir Calunga at Urca do Minhoto, which breaks thirty kilometres offshore and has even played host to a number of XXL Award nominations (Alexandre Alessy)

Surely, the pointbreaks of northern Brazil do turn on — at least occasionally. But the difference is reliability.

Unlike Queensland, where summer cyclone season delivers a dependable pulse, southern Mexico, or even Peru on the opposite coast of South America, where south swells charge in from April to October, the coastline of northern Brazil has no such promise for surfers. Travellers are more likely to share sessions with kitesurfers or windsurfers, perhaps even the odd longboarder, rather than shortboarders disappearing deep into the bay as they line up section after section of roping point surf.

So as the CT comp plays out in Rio — likely in punchy, unpredictable beachies — it’s worth remembering that just a few thousand kilometres to the north lies an untold surf story.

Northern Brazil is a study in surf potential thwarted by atmosphere. A coast of “almosts.” But if you're a surf explorer — or a swell chaser with plenty of time and patience — it might just be your kind of frontier.

//LORENA WOORTMANN

(Readers of our WA Forecast Notes will be aware of Lorena's existing work on Swellnet, however as a graduate scientist specialising in coastal modelling Lorena will also be contributing surf science articles)