Itaúnas sits about 260 kilometers north of Vitória, in the last reach of Espírito Santo before Bahia begins. The coast here is a ribbon of pale sand backed by towering dunes, and the old village made the mistake of standing too close. Deforestation upriver and shifting wind patterns set the sand in motion. Year by year the dunes crept inland, filling in doorways and then windows and then rooftops, until the villagers took what they could carry and crossed the Itaúnas River to rebuild on safer ground. The old town is somewhere beneath the dunes now, occasionally a weathered cross or a rooftop edge surfaces after a storm, then disappears again. Walking the dunes at sunset, you are walking on a buried town.

Every July the new village turns into a dance floor. The National Forró Festival brings thousands of people to Itaúnas for a week of accordion, triangle, and zabumba - the hand-drum that keeps the pulse. Forró is a Northeastern Brazilian tradition, a dance for couples held close enough to share one pair of feet, and Itaúnas has become one of its most celebrated shrines. Summer nights spill onto the street, shoes come off, and the sand itself becomes the floor. The music does not stop for rain and rarely stops for dawn. Locals say the forró culture settled here because the dunes made the town feel set apart from time, a place where nothing is expected of you except the next step.

Itaúnas State Park, created in the 1990s and part of the Atlantic Forest South-East Reserves that UNESCO named a World Heritage Site, wraps the village in 3,600 hectares of protected coast. In a single afternoon you can cross seven ecosystems: sea beach, river, swamp, mangrove, sandbank, and the Tableland Atlantic Forest. The Itaúnas River threads through it all. Capybaras shuffle through the marshes. Sloths hang almost motionless in the canopy. Broad-snouted caimans watch from the riverbanks, and skunks called maritacas slip through the undergrowth on their own errands. Thirty-eight kilometers of beach stretch north to the mouth of the Riacho Doce, where the state line with Bahia is drawn not by signs but by a stream emptying into surf.

The beach between river and state border is one of Brazil's quiet wonders, a long unbroken strand with almost no development. Sea turtles haul themselves ashore here in season to dig nests, and the Tamar Project - the national sea turtle conservation effort - works this coast, marking clutches, protecting hatchlings, and teaching the village's children that the animals sharing their sand are something worth keeping. Sandboarding was once the tourist entertainment on the dunes, but IBAMA, the federal environmental agency, banned the practice to let the sand keep its peace. Now the dunes belong again to the wind, the sparse vegetation that holds them together, and the small creatures that have always lived between land and sea.

Getting to Itaúnas is part of the charm. From Vitória, you drive north on the BR-101, cut east at Conceição da Barra, and finish the trip on 27 kilometers of dirt road that dissolves into pure sand near the village. There is no airport, no bus terminal, no paved arrival. The telephone area code is still 27, the same as most of northern Espírito Santo, a small reminder that even remote places are connected to the grid. But Itaúnas wears its remoteness lightly. The climate is humid and warm year-round, averaging 22 degrees Celsius, and the sunsets over the dunes still light the sand from the inside, the way they did when the old town stood on the other side.