Continental extremes are usually decided by geology. This one was decided by surveying. At roughly 7°09' south and 34°48' west, Ponta do Seixas lies about eight kilometres southeast of João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba, on the coastal highway that runs north toward the port of Cabedelo. Nothing about the place announces itself. The shoreline simply runs out of east to give, then bends away southward. What the 1941 survey established was that it bends a little later here than anywhere else on the mainland — that the tip of the Americas is not a headland you have to climb but a strip of beach you can walk barefoot.

The claim needs its qualifier, because three different superlatives get tangled here. Count the islands, and the easternmost point of the Americas is Nordostrundingen, on the northeastern shoulder of Greenland at 11°29' west — a frozen headland above 81 degrees north, more than twenty degrees of longitude ahead of Paraíba. Ask instead for the easternmost point of Brazilian territory, and the answer is the islands of Trindade and Martim Vaz, far out in the South Atlantic. Ponta do Seixas holds the title that remains, and it is the one people actually mean: the easternmost point of the continental Americas, the last of the mainland before the ocean takes over.

The land steps up abruptly behind the beach. These flat-topped tables of sedimentary rock are called tabuleiros, and they shape the whole Paraíba coast — a green shelf ending in a bright wall above the sand. Rain is generous on this eastern edge, which is why the tabuleiros stay green while the interior of the Northeast bakes under the same sun. Follow the highway north and it delivers you to Cabedelo, where the Paraíba River meets the sea. Go south and the white beaches simply keep going, kilometre after kilometre, with the ocean always on your left.

About 800 metres north stands the structure everyone photographs instead. The Cabo Branco lighthouse, opened in 1972, is a triangular concrete tower eighteen metres tall, painted white with a horizontal black band, its three winglike projections spreading 3.5 metres above the floor — a shape meant to suggest a sisal plant, the crop that once underwrote the state's economy. Its focal plane sits forty-six metres above the sea, and the light is a real working aid to navigation: a white flash every ten seconds, visible some 27 nautical miles out to sea. It stands on a cliff the Atlantic is steadily eating.

Visitors routinely collapse Cabo Branco and Ponta do Seixas into a single destination, and foreigners do it almost every time. They are separate beaches in separate official neighbourhoods, and only one of them is the continental corner — the sandy one, to the south, without the famous tower. The confusion is understandable and mostly harmless. From the cliff at Cabo Branco the whole João Pessoa coastline unrolls to the north; walk down and south to the point itself and the view narrows to sand, surf, and open water. The record-holder is the plainer of the two, which is often how geography works.