Before the Insano, Porto das Dunas was mostly dunes. The slide opened in 1989 and immediately changed the map. At 135 feet, it was taller than a twelve-story building and steep enough that riders reach speeds pilots would recognize from landing approaches. The Guinness record held for about a decade, until 1999, when Kilimanjaro at Aldeia das Águas in Rio de Janeiro state went up 193 feet and claimed the crown. By then the Insano had done its job. Beach Park had grown from a single water slide into a complex covering 170,000 square meters, drawing 1.7 million visitors a year, and was voted the second-best water park in the world in 2014. The scream the Insano produces is still the soundtrack of Ceará summer.

Walk past the Insano and the park keeps escalating. The Arrepius complex occupies roughly 7,000 square meters and holds five different ProSlide attractions, anchored by The Skybox - a transparent capsule that drops riders down 25 meters through a see-through tube so the rest of the park can watch. Beside it stands Vaikuntudo, one of the largest funnel slides in the world, where rafts swing back and forth inside a giant open mouth until centrifugal force finally spits them out. These are not rides you stumble into by accident. They are engineered experiences, built by the Canadian firm ProSlide and installed with the precision of industrial equipment - which, in a sense, they are. The raw material is human adrenaline. The output is the same scream, a million times a year.

The water park is the loud part. Around it, Beach Park has built four distinct accommodations that share the beach and the same 15-minute drive from Fortaleza but serve different visitors. Suites Resort offers 182 seaside apartments for families who want room to spread out. Oceani Beach Park Resort, 131 rooms directly on Porto das Dunas beach, is the design-forward option for couples. Aqua Resort adds tennis courts, a fitness center, a pool bar, and an infinity pool for guests who want sport alongside slides. Wellness Resort and its 90 rooms focuses squarely on families with young kids. Together they make Beach Park less a water park than a resort town organized around the idea of getting wet.

Beach Park collects trophies the way some resorts collect guests. The World Waterpark Association has repeatedly honored its advertising campaigns - best TV commercial, best print media, best radio spot, best YouTube campaign - along with quality and industry leadership awards. O Estado newspaper named it the best park in Brazil. Viagem e Turismo magazine named it the best theme park. Such recognition helped the park land one of its stranger credits: a filming location for the 1997 Brazilian comedy O Noviço Rebelde, Renato Aragão's loose adaptation of The Sound of Music. The nuns, briefly, splashed.

The location matters. Aquiraz is older than Fortaleza - in fact, it served as the first capital of the Ceará captaincy during Brazil's colonial period, long before the capital moved north. That history is not on display at Beach Park. What the park offers instead is the same equatorial sun, the same steady trade winds that make this stretch of coast a kitesurfing capital, and a view of the Atlantic that the Insano's viewing platform frames like a postcard. From 135 feet up, just before the fall, you can see both the turquoise water ahead and the colonial church towers inland. Then gravity takes over and you stop looking at anything at all.