Natal Travel Guide

Introduction

Natal is a city built on sand. It blows across the city streets and piles up in drifts like snow. It lines the city's beaches, lies beneath the city's foundations, landscapes the city's parks, and piles up in towering dunes that form the city's picture-postcard views. Outside Natal, the sand dunes spread in mountainous dune ranges that stretch for miles.

Perhaps because sand is not the most fertile of foundations, Natal has been an oft-overlooked sandlot of a city for much of its history, noticed by the powers that be only when some other power tried to take it away.

The Portuguese founded a town on the banks of the Potengi River to drive out the French. To hold the territory, the Portuguese built Forte dos Reis Magos in 1599. The fort's foundation was celebrated with a Mass on December 25, 1599, and so the city was named Natal (the Portuguese word for Christmas). After that, the Portuguese pretty much ignored the place. By 1757 there were a whopping 120 buildings in the...