Top Things to do in State of Piaui
What to do and see in State of Piaui, Brazil: The Best Nature & Parks
Discover the best top things to do in State of Piaui, Brazil including Serra da Capivara National Park, Itaqui Beach, National Park of Serra das Confusoes, Parque Nacional de Sete Cidades, Delta Rio Parnaiba, Coqueiro Beach, Poldros Beach, Macapa Beach, Carnaubinhas Beach, Praia do Coqueiro.
Restaurants in State of Piaui
1. Serra da Capivara National Park
Overall Ratings
5.0 based on 268 reviews
Important archeological site with cave paintings made by the prehistoric men.
Reviewed By Cassio_de_Figueiredo - Marseille, France
The Serra da Capivara National Park, and the work of almost 50 years of archaeologist Niède Guidon with the communities that live near its boundaries are marvels that I highly recommend. However, the Park positions itself basing only in narratives of the past, that is, all you will see and hear refers to “extinct” peoples only, who left us their wonderful cave paintings. In so doing, the Park excludes the current discourses of present-day Amerindian descendants who lived, until recently within its boundaries. Important: you can only visit the park if you are accompanied by a local tour-guide, which is a good thing as this prevents vandalism and provides employment to locals. However, be extra careful with those local tour-guides: make sure you know exactly what you want to see on a given day and make sure he commits to taking you to those places - I advise you to buy beforehand a booklet at the Museum in São Raimundo, as soon as you arrive, it lists all you can see in the Park - and make sure your guide commits to guiding you for the whole day (from 7:30 to 17h), as they often invent false excuses to shorten their working day, such as, “there is a Jaguar with a baby here”, “there are ferocious bees there”...
2. Itaqui Beach
3. National Park of Serra das Confusoes
4. Parque Nacional de Sete Cidades
Overall Ratings
4.5 based on 221 reviews
Reviewed By ajaceman
Charlie and the lost cities of Piaui. After 163 mind numbing kilometres of nondescript highway south of Parnaiba, you arrive in the small town of Brasileira, where your driver makes an abrupt left turn onto cobbled streets, crawls over a long out of service meter gauge railway track and follows a twelve km dirt washboard road to the gate of the Parque de Sete Cidades. Your first business is a stop at the fazenda to scour the menu and order lunch containing various dishes of galinha (chicken) or "coat", presumably "goat", of which there were many wandering around in the bush. Lunch would be prepared while you were touring the cities and ready when you came back much later in the morning. Next comes securing a guide, a necessity for touring the park. She grabbed her boots, guarda sol (umbrella), four litre water supply back pack and joined us in the car. Our tour of the seven cities had begun. To be clear, each of these "cities" is actually a rock formation. Taken as a whole these cities have garnered international fame due simply to their very strange and most unusual appearance, although you'd be hard pressed to find any evidence of it outside of a Lonely Planet guide to Brazil. The process goes something like this. You drive to each of the cities along a twelve km dirt road, stopping at each one to walk an exploratory trail. Then you reboard the car and move on to the next city. The tour takes three hours at which time the circuit is complete, the guide is deposited at the gate, and you repair to the fazenda for lunch before driving back to Parnaiba. Now for the meat and potatoes description of this geologically and, coincidentally, anthropologically fascinating park. Deposition of the quartz rich, medium grained sandstones that comprise the majority of the rock formations here occurred in late Devonian time, some 400 million years ago. The sandstones, conglomerates and silts are indicative of varying energy environments at time of deposition. There are all kinds of water sourced ripples, stratification and bedding planes, fluvial outflow features, eolian wind scouring all interspersed with the presence of iron rich nodules which ultimately influenced the formation of the many curious features of the terrain in the park. The seven cities are really strange rock outcrops that leave you scratching your head in wonder at their formation, but when the light goes on, you know it's mostly the result of four million centuries of rain water run off and wind scouring controlled to an extensive degree by horizontal bedding planes and differential cap rock durability resulting in vertical rock towers that, if you squint hard enough with fingers crossed behind your back, appear as the heads of past monarchs or maps of the country or kissing lizards, all of which the guide encourages you to see. The lack of extensive metamorphic alteration or igneous melt down is due to the stability of the intercontinental craton over time as Pangaea broke apart allowing South America and Africa to rift apart in the formation of the Atlantic Ocean. The almost complete lack of folding or faulting of strata is significant in that it has preserved these rocks without obfuscation or other variables that would cloud interpretation of these fascinating features. The presence of convoluted bedding planes, the Liesegang rings ( more about those in a moment), and alveolar erosion overlying glacial striations point to extensive sedimentary deposition following in the wake of the retreat of an extensive glacial ice sheet. Really? So, rapid sedimentation, followed by the catastrophic flooding that can accompany a retreating ice sheet. Reference the Pleistocene collapse of the ice dam retaining glacial lake Missoula and forming the Dry Falls and gorges of the Columbia River in the state of Washington, USA. Ah! Oh! Yes! thought the thawing Fammenian crosopterigians, finally summer is returning to the land of eternal winter. The Liesegang tubes, made of iron rich mineral waters infiltrating erosion resistant sandstones, are rolled up like crepes and exposed through the erosion of softer surrounding matrix. There is a concentration of these in one of the cities. Brazilian geologists interpret these "canhões" (cannons) as having a non-biological origin. To me, they are per mineralized tree trunks, remnants of a forest blown over in a Noah-like flood, piled up and laid flat, rapidly buried in sediment, with the wood soaked with iron in solution and crystallizing, thus preserving their original shape. They look for all the world like petrified wood, although you'd be hard pressed today to find any evidence of tree ring growth due to the extensive alteration. Besides, crawling around with a hammer, sample bag and jewellers loop is strictly verboten. The Tabajara tribe of Tupi Indians were here an estimated 6,000 years ago based on radiometric Carbon 14 isotope dating. They left behind bright red drawings made of iron oxide mixed with vegetable oil or animal blood. Various interpretations as to what the drawings represent exist, from hunting to mapping to a sketch of an "airplane" that looks like the Wright brothers Kitty Hawk flyer. These drawings show up at the foot of vertical walls in various cities in the park. An additional item of more recent interest is the small cave where a man looked after his epileptic son from 1931 until his death in 1944. The boy is interred in a cement sarcophagus near the cave. A strange feature of the cave is a deep, perfectly circular, mortar bowl formed by the endless grinding of herbal remedies by the father for his son. The closing of a creaking gate, as much in need of maintenance as many of the signposts here, signals that the tour is complete. We drive back to the fazenda for lunch. Bowls of rice, salad, Pirão appear, as does the main dish. The presence of actual chicken feet, yellow claws and all, topping some bits of back, wings, and drumstick indicate that some language wires may have been crossed in ordering lunch three hours ago. Maybe we should have opted for "coat". Maybe not. I don't know, but load up my plate anyway and slurp up a quart sized bottled of cold Guarana. It's thirsty and tiring work wandering around in the back woods of Piaui.
5. Delta Rio Parnaiba
Overall Ratings
4.5 based on 786 reviews
Reviewed By XdRC - Sao Paulo, Brazil
We (couple + 2 teens) took the private boat tour, which included the sunset visit to the Guara (red bird) sanctuary. Fantastic day !
