The Story of Saquarema, Brazil
Praia de Itaúna runs east from a rocky promontory crowned by the white church of Nossa Senhora de Nazareth, in the town of Saquarema on the coast east of Rio de Janeiro. Against the rock shelf under the church, southbound sand piles into a bank that turns south-east swell into a wedging, hollow left — “the Point” — with rights and lefts along the beach and a right called Barrinha on the far side of the rocks. Brazilians call it the Maracanã of surf, after the football stadium, for the roar of the crowd on the sand: the Championship Tour has run here every year since 2017 bar the pandemic, and the 2025 event drew some 410,000 people over eleven days.
The Maracanã of Surf
Surfers from Rio found Saquarema in the early 1970s, when Itaúna was still a fishing village, and camped there for weeks at a time. The first Festival de Surfe de Saquarema ran in 1975, and the 1976 edition — “Som, Surf & Sol” — added three days of concerts by Raul Seixas, Rita Lee and Ângela Ro Ro, a Brazilian Woodstock that drew a crowd remembered as forty thousand strong. The Maracanã nickname dates from those years. World-level competition arrived with a qualifying event in 1997 and a first world-tour contest in 2002, whose final was surfed in small two-to-three-foot waves with a young Mick Fanning the runner-up.
In 2017 the World Surf League moved the Rio Pro from Postinho in Barra da Tijuca to Itaúna, citing the old venue’s poor consistency and water quality, and the beach has been a Championship Tour fixture since: Adriano de Souza and Sally Fitzgibbons won in 2017, Filipe Toledo and Stephanie Gilmore in 2018, Toledo and Fitzgibbons in 2019, Toledo and Carissa Moore in 2022, Yago Dora — with a perfect-ten full-rotation air in the final — and Caitlin Simmers in 2023, Italo Ferreira and Simmers in 2024, Cole Houshmand and Molly Picklum in 2025, and Dora and Sawyer Lindblad in 2026. Saquarema was declared the state’s surf capital in 2017, and in 2020 a Senate committee approved a bill naming it Brazil’s national surf capital.
Rio to the Church on the Hill
Saquarema lies about a hundred kilometres east of Rio de Janeiro by road — roughly two hours over the Rio–Niterói bridge, up the BR-101 and out along either the Via Lagos toll road or the older RJ-106 coastal highway — and Auto Viação 1001 runs direct buses from the Novo Rio terminal about every half hour. The town, founded in 1841 and home to some ninety thousand people, sits on the strip of land between the Lagoa de Saquarema and the sea; the lagoon covers about 24 square kilometres in four shallow arms and meets the ocean through a channel right beside the church hill.
That hill is the landmark. A chapel to Nossa Senhora de Nazareth was built on the promontory in the 1660s after the legend of the saint’s image found on the shore in 1630; the present church was completed in 1837 and heritage-listed in 2001, and from its churchyard you look straight down onto the Point. The headland separates Praia da Vila, on the town side to the west, from Itaúna to the east. The contest site sets up on the sand immediately east of the church, the seafront along Avenida Oceânica is walkable, and the surf-town economy of pousadas, board shops and beach kiosks fills in behind it.
Lagoon, Restinga and a Short Shelf
The church stands on some of the oldest rock in Brazil: orthogneiss and amphibolite of the Região dos Lagos Complex, about two billion years old, cut by pegmatites and 130-million-year-old diabase dykes, and listed as a geosite of the Costões e Lagunas Geopark for the faults and fractures in its sea-cliffs. East of the lagoon mouth the Restinga de Massambaba runs 48 kilometres to Arraial do Cabo — a double sand barrier built over the last 120,000 years of sea-level swings that impounds the Araruama Lagoon, the world’s largest permanently hypersaline lagoon. The Massambaba protected area guards restinga scrub with around 660 plant species, 26 of them found nowhere else, and the lagoon behind the beach holds 31 fish species, crabs, oysters and a great many birds.
The surf owes its power to geography. The coast faces the open South Atlantic window with nothing to shadow it, and the continental shelf narrows to about 85 kilometres here — far shorter than off Santos or southern Brazil — so long-period energy from the South Atlantic lows arrives with less lost to the bottom. Surfers put it simply: the shelf is the shortest on the coast. The water runs 21 to 26°C on monthly average, warmest in February and March and coolest in August and September, when the Cabo Frio upwelling to the east can push cold water along this stretch.