Where the word itself came from is less settled. One reading takes it from Old Tupi tamandûaré — roughly, a different sort of anteater, tamanduá with a suffix hung on the end. Another argues for something closer to "repopulator," from a Tupi construction rendered as tab-moi-inda-ré. The second reading has a story attached. In the Tupi telling, Tamanduaré was a shaman who opened a spring that would not stop, until the water rose over everything; he and his wife climbed a palm tree and waited out the flood, and from the two of them came the Tupinambá. Scholars have not agreed on the etymology and probably will not. What survives is a place name older than the Portuguese, older than the fort, older than the barony, still attached to the same few kilometres of sand.

The cove at Tamandaré was worth holding, and for most of a century people kept taking it from each other. João Fernandes Vieira threw up a redoubt here in July 1645, in the fighting that followed the Portuguese landings against Dutch Brazil. The Dutch admiral Jan Cornelisz Lichthart took it and enlarged it. Vieira rebuilt it in 1677, by then Superintendent of Fortifications. The structure standing today is essentially the one begun in 1808 under Governor Caetano Pinto de Miranda Montenegro and finished around 1812: a quadrangular plan with pentagonal bastions at the corners, Vauban's geometry transplanted to a Brazilian beach, armed at first with twenty-eight cannon and later with eighteen. The Forte de Santo Inácio de Loyola is the only Pernambuco fort outside the Recife metropolitan area. It has carried a lighthouse since 1902 and has been under Navy jurisdiction since 1978 — the fleet, in the end, coming back to the town that named its patron.

A few kilometres south, the Rio Formoso runs out of land and meets the sea, and the meeting produces the thing everyone comes for: a shallow warm lagoon at the river mouth, calm even when the open Atlantic is not, the sand fine and pale under water you can read a coin through. This is Praia dos Carneiros, which TripAdvisor's reviewers once ranked the second most beautiful beach in Brazil and the twelfth in the world, and which on a Recife weekend feels exactly that discovered. The small white Capela de São Benedito sits almost on the sand, close enough to the tide line that photographs of it look staged. It is dedicated to Benedict the Moor, the Sicilian son of enslaved Africans who became one of the most widely venerated saints in Black Catholic Brazil — a dedication that says a good deal about who built the chapels along this coast.

Inland, the Reserva Biológica de Saltinho protects 562 hectares of Atlantic Forest shared between Tamandaré and neighbouring Rio Formoso. That number is the whole point. This forest once ran unbroken from the coast deep into the interior; sugar took nearly all of it, and what remains in Pernambuco survives in fragments measured in hundreds of hectares rather than thousands of square kilometres. Saltinho is one of the larger northern remnants, and it is closed to casual visitors for good reason. Offshore, the reefs do similar work — the coral banks that make the swimming so gentle here also anchor a coastal ecosystem that Brazil now protects along most of this shoreline.

Tamandaré itself only became a municipality on 28 September 1995, splitting from Rio Formoso after ninety years as one of its districts, and it still has the loose feel of a place that recently stopped being somebody else's suburb. Around 24,000 people live across its 214 square kilometres. Almost everything worth walking to is within a few blocks of the water. What is not, you reach by táxi charrete — a horse-drawn wagon, still a working form of transport here, clopping between beaches at a speed that suits the place. Between October and February the pousadas fill with recifenses and the room rates climb; the rest of the year, the reefs empty out and the town goes back to fishing and to itself.