The archipelago of Fernando de Noronha

A bit of history

The official story, based of Amerigo Verspucci’s account at least, is that the first tourists to visit Fernando de Noronha (FdN) were a Portuguese expedition led by Fernão de Loronha who arrived on the 10^th of August 1503. Like many of the tourists who visit the island today, the Portuguese stayed for a week before heading off on their way south-west.

Despite the official date of discovery being 1503, the islands, located 200nm off the northeast coast of Brazil, appear on Juan de la Cosa’s 1500 nautical chart and, on Alberto Cantino’s 1502 Quaresma chart. There are some interesting explanations for this slight discrepancy in dates, but the most mundane, and probably most realistic, possibility is that someone Portuguese had enjoyed these islands’ delights before Señor de Loronha.

It was Fernando’s name, however, that stuck to the islands. This wasn’t some vanity move on Fernão’s part, he had actually called them the Ilhas de São Lourenço, reflecting the Saint’s day on which they were sighted, and for a while they were also referred to as the Ilhas São João. Fernando de Noronha, however, was finally settled upon because of his lasting influence on the islands’ development.

Captaincy over FdN

As part of the establishment of colonial control over Brazil in the 16^th century, the Portuguese King established a series of Captaincies over different parts of the coast. These Captaincies functioned as Governorships and gave the Captains control over pretty much all activity in their Captaincy.

Fernão held the hereditary captaincy of the FdN islands as well as an official monopoly on trade in Brazil and between Brazil and Portugal. Not a bad gig. The FdN islands served as the transport hub in his web of activities and remained the family’s private property until well after the expiration of his lovely trade monopoly.

A brief Dutch interlude

Life on the island seems to have ticked along quite nicely until 1629 when the Dutch West India Company took possession of FdN as part of their occupation of Brazil’s northeast region. The Dutch were on a bit of a hiding to nothing, though, as the Company’s real focus was the Caribbean and its sugar production, so ultimately the financial and military support necessary to hold onto this newly ‘acquired’ territory wasn’t forthcoming.

In 1654 the Portuguese managed to kick the Dutch out and the islands (along with various parts of the mainland) became Portuguese once again. And this is how the Brazilians in the NE states avoided becoming Dutch speakers.

After this brief period of excitement, the islands seem to have settle back into a quiet life until the establishment of a penal colony there in the late 1800s. Indeed, so little happened that the visit by Charles Darwin and the Beagle in 1832 is one of the major historical events portrayed in the island’s museum today. We can only hope that this quiet island life was also a good life.

More recent history

In the 20^th C, however, things began to heat up again on the island. First it became an important link in transoceanic communications cable networks before also becoming a refueling stop for early trans-oceanic aviation.

Then in 1988 roughly 70% of the islands and their surrounding waters were declared a Marine National Park before being listed as a World Heritage Site in 2001. Combined with perfect beach weather, this naturally led to the islands developing into one of Brazil’s most prized tourist destinations.

Happily, at about the time of the park’s declaration, a limit was set on how many tourists could be on the island at any one time. This was done to protect the parks natural environment and to ensure that visitors did not overwhelm the islands resources (particularly fresh water) and infrastructure.

This limit is still in effect today with a daily cap of 460-500 tourists and means that while tourism is the all-consuming economic focus of the island, it has not consumed all of the island. Most resorts and hotels are small, somewhat rustic and low key in nature, as if perhaps being locally developed and owned. Furthermore, the place has a feel to it of a small town community, which of course is exactly what it is.

The unfortunate side to this for the visitor is that, while by general tourism standards the island is ‘rustic’, this charm is offered at what can best be described as ‘premium’ prices. This, then, is a place that would only be visited by Brazilians with a reasonable amount of spare cash. Luckily for the island, Brazil has a huge middle class and there is clearly no shortage of folk who want to partake of the island’s pleasures.

Checking in to Brazil

Our first task upon arriving in FdN was to get ashore and get ourselves cleared in. So having tidied up Yuma and ourselves, we got the dinghy in the water and headed across to the Harbour Master’s office. As we climbed up the gangway from the floating dock, we were intercepted by two very friendly Brazilian Navy officers who had been waiting for us and who escorted us down to said office.

Here, we had a very jolly time of not quite understanding each other and then correcting our misunderstandings and despite it all this, slowly getting the paperwork sorted out. Getting our immigration stamps required sending off our passports with a woman who appeared to have just wandered in off the street but supposedly worked for immigration. We were told that she would bring them back at 1900 and give them to the Harbour Master, if he was still there, otherwise tomorrow, or before we left, we could pick them up. Whatever, they were just passports.

Dolphin watching

With formalities completed, we could relax into our spectacular surroundings and spend our time enjoying all that the island had to offer. Foremost amongst the different nature-based tourism offerings at FdN are whale and dolphin watching tours with the latter, at this time of the year, being the most reliable performers and easily the favourites.

Yuma, being anchored in the centre of the harbour, turned out to be the perfect spot for dolphin watching and so we spent a couple of days doing not much at all other than watching dolphins. Every day 20, 30, 40 or more spinner dolphins spent hours hunting backwards and forwards across the harbour in ever-changing pods of a few to a dozen individuals.

While quartering the seafloor to herd their prey was their focus, there were always one or two individuals whose excitement could not be contained and which suddenly burst clear of the water, leaping high and spinning multiple times before crashing back down.

They would often do this five or six times in rapid but clearly flagging succession. We tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to get photos of them jumping. Too often they were too far away to make a good photo, or would jump unexpectedly over there, then again somewhere else. It was hard. That at any rate is our excuse for our pretty average shots.

Either way, the dolphin watching was fascinating and only enhanced by the fact that the dolphins almost completely ignore the scores of tourists that follow them on pedal boats, kayaks, and in motor boats of various sizes. Unfortunately, but not surprising, you are not allowed to be in the water when the dolphins are around, so there was no snorkeling or diving with them.

Diving

While not allowed to be done with the dolphins, diving and snorkeling are also among FdN’s major attractions. With a generous selection of rocky dive sites, a number of wrecks and abundant sea life that mixes tropical and temperate species, this is hardly surprising.

Of particular interest are the number and variety of shark species that can be seen (if you aren’t David and Frederieke who seem to always be looking at little creatures when the big creatures come swimming along).

While we have our own dive gear on board, finding a dive location on FdN where one is allowed to dive alone and can easily leave a dinghy, proved to be a bit of a conundrum. So, after checking out a few companies, and recovering from the shock when we learned the price per person (let’s just say more than in Australia), we decided to do two dives with Noronha Diver.

This was a great outfit with a wooden boat that was in dire need of a paint job, but with a captain who could manoeuvre her into the tightest of places and a crew who were as excited to be diving as we were. Luckily, there were only three other tourists on the boat and these were also experienced divers, so we got to do two of the more advanced dives the company had on offer, Cagarras Funda and Ilha do Meio do Cabritos.

The second one in particular was exhilarating, being dropped off on the island’s exposed site and drift diving through a narrow and shallow (appr 2 m) gap into the protected site. All the while waving to surprised-looking fish as we were flying by! A great dive that we would never have been able to find or do by ourselves.

We didn’t see any sharks while diving, though everyone else on the boat did. We made up for it later though when we sat on a cliff, looking down on Sancho beach and watched a very large tiger shark cruising along in between the breakers about 50m away from a mob of happy, plump and completely unaware Brazilians. No sharks were fed and no Brazilians were hurt in this episode.

Walking

Finally, we spent a bit of time on land hiking various trails on the island and lots of time watching and photographing the island’s beautiful birds. One morning, walking down a muddy road to do a hike, we were lucky enough to be able to observe at close quarters a very modern creature that we had only ever heard of before; an influencer.

This came in the form of a plump Polish woman who was heading the same way and wanted to make sure she was on the right road. We told her that we hoped she was because that was where we were going too and she immediately launched into a discussion in English.

We quickly found out that she had actually lived in Amsterdam for the past 15 years and so the conversation switched to Dutch and, she being more comfortable in that language, increased her rate of talking dramatically until the sound of her voice, like a stream running over rocks, became a constant babble.

For the next couple of hours, she stuck to us and kept up an entertaining monologue, pausing only to take selfies, to ask us to take a photo of her, and occasionally to whip out a new piece of clothing to take another selfie.

All up she might have taken a 100 selfies during the couple of hours before we parted company. Every now and again she would offer to take a picture of us and was a bit baffled when we said, ‘yeah, nah, not necessary but thanks’. She was a handful but she was nice and she was fun.