The tourist spine runs west to east along the Atlantic. Praia de Iracema is the budget and nightlife end, full of cheap pousadas and the refurbished colonial warehouses of Dragao do Mar, where weekend crowds spill between bars into the early hours. Praia de Meireles sits in the middle, anchoring the major hotels on Avenida Beira Mar, the broad seafront promenade that is the city's most visited stretch. Further east you reach Mucuripe, the working commercial port where jangadas still come and go, and then Praia do Futuro, the windswept beach about eight kilometers from downtown where the water is better but the undertow is serious and the nearby favelas make nighttime excursions risky. Pick your neighborhood first, then pick your place.

Fortaleza is a forro stronghold. The accordion-driven dance music originated in Brazil's northeast, and the city treats it as a seven-day practice rather than a weekend entertainment. Traditional venues assign themselves specific nights: Pirata Bar famously owns Mondays, and other places hold Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and so on through the week. When you ask locals where to dance, their first question will always be which night you mean. Couples lock into the classic tight-hold step near the stage while tourists learn on the edges. For something rawer and more tourist-free, you have to leave the Beira Mar corridor and move toward the outskirts, where a taxi ride of thirty reais puts you into neighborhood halls that sound like forro a hundred years ago.

The 25 kilometers of urban beach support roughly 150 shacks at Praia do Futuro alone, and each one has a personality. Crocobeach draws a international crowd and runs an "After Beach" live-music event that ends at sunset. Chico do Caranguejo specializes in crab and keeps the place spotlessly clean. Vira Verao pulls young Brazilian crowds. Vila Gale is the neatest and most expensive, run by the hotel behind it. On Beira Mar closer to downtown, Sate Hut leans Dutch-Indonesian on the menu and keeps a working bathroom, a non-trivial amenity. The game is simple: pick a shack that matches your mood, order the fried shrimp or the crab, accept the sunbed for a few reais, and watch the ocean do its work.

The Varjota neighborhood, a few blocks inland from Beira Mar along Rua Frederico Borges, is where the city does its serious dining. Steakhouses called churrascarias serve the all-you-can-eat rodizio meat parade common across Brazil, but the seafood here is what you came for. Ray moqueca and mackerel stew trace back to the jangadeiros, the fishermen who bring their small sailing rafts in at dawn after nights on the open sea. At the Mercado dos Peixes in Mucuripe, you can buy a kilo of shrimp directly from the stall and hand it to a neighboring shack to fry for three reais. Tapioca, the cassava-flour crepe stuffed with coconut, cheese, or condensed milk, is everywhere. Fresh fruit juices made from fruits you've never seen before, sapoti, siriguela, murici, come cheap and spectacularly good.

The coast outside Fortaleza hides some of Brazil's best-known beach destinations. Cumbuco, to the west, has become a kitesurfing capital, its trade winds steady enough to put the sport into the weekly forecast. Canoa Quebrada, east of the city, has shifted from hippie refuge to resort town but keeps its weekend nightlife. Jericoacoara, around 300 kilometers west, demands a 4x4 for the final sandy approach but rewards you with dune lagoons and streets that still reject electrical street lighting by local law. Closer in, the Beach Park water complex at Porto das Dunas costs 170 reais a day and runs on industrial scale, but the public beach outside it is free and genuinely lovely. Most tour agencies along Beira Mar sell these trips at fixed prices; a negotiated taxi with three other travelers often beats them.