🇧🇷 Brazil · Northeast
Natal is the capital of Rio Grande do Norte and one of the great gateways to Brazil's Northeast: a bright city facing the Atlantic at the mouth of the Potengi River, famous for its nearly 300 days of sun a year — hence its nickname 'Cidade do Sol' — for its dunes that march down to the sea and for its buggy rides. It was founded on Christmas Day 1599 (Natal means 'Christmas' in Portuguese) around the Forte dos Reis Magos, a star-shaped fortress planted on a sandbank at the bar of the Potengi, and it keeps that air of an Atlantic colonial town mixed with that of a modern beach resort.
The tourist heart beats in Ponta Negra, the city's most famous urban beach, with its calçadão (seafront promenade) of kiosks, bars and restaurants and, above all, with the Morro do Careca, a giant dune more than a hundred metres high wedged between two vegetation-covered hills: the undisputed postcard of Natal. Almost all of a visitor's life is organised from there: the hotels, the nightlife and the departure of the tours. Further south, the Via Costeira holds the big beachfront resorts, running alongside the Parque das Dunas, a huge urban Atlantic Forest reserve, the second largest of its kind in Brazil.
But what makes Natal singular is what surrounds it. To the north, the Litoral Norte offers the most classic outing: the buggy ride 'com ou sem emoção' over the dunes of Genipabu, with dromedary stops, zip lines over lagoons (Lagoa de Pitangui, Lagoa de Jacumã) and, further on, the natural pools of the Maracajaú parrachos, the 'potiguar Caribbean', 7 km offshore. To the south, the Litoral Sul holds the Maior Cajueiro do Mundo in Pirangi — a single cashew tree covering almost a hectare — the coloured cliffs of Tabatinga and, above all, the dazzling Praia da Pipa, with its Baía dos Golfinhos and its cliffs. Add an intense history — from the Potiguara and the Dutch to Natal's key role in the Second World War as the 'Trampolim da Vitória' — and you have a destination that combines beach, nature and memory.
The coast of Rio Grande do Norte was inhabited by the Potiguara — a people of the Tupi-Guarani family whose name means 'shrimp eaters' — long before the Europeans arrived; allied first with the French and then with the Dutch, they resisted the Portuguese conquest for decades. The founding moment came when the Iberian Crown (at the height of the union of the crowns of Portugal and Spain under Philip II) ordered a fortress built to defend the bar of the 'Grande' river: on 6 January 1598, Epiphany, construction began on the star-shaped Forte dos Reis Magos, and almost a year later, on 25 December 1599, the city was founded a league from the fort, named Natal for the Christmas date. In 1633 the Dutch invaded the region, took the fort and renamed the town Nova Amsterdã, holding it until they were expelled in 1654. Recovered by the Portuguese, Natal grew slowly until the cotton cycle — the 'white gold' — transformed the city in the second half of the 19th century, above all the Ribeira district, beside the Potengi port. Its most famous moment came in the Second World War: as the point in Brazil closest to Africa, Natal hosted the Parnamirim air base (Parnamirim Field), the largest American base outside the United States, known as the 'Trampolim da Vitória', through which thousands of aircraft passed on their way to the fronts in Europe and Africa. After the war, Natal reinvented itself as the capital of sun, dunes and beach tourism. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The state on Brazil's corner, where the continent bends south and comes closest to Africa: land of the Potiguara and of the Fortaleza dos Reis Magos, of cotton and of the country's largest salt works. This is where the Second World War's 'Springboard to Victory' took off, and today its dunes, buggies and falésias define the sun of Natal and Pipa.
Read the history of Rio Grande do Norte →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before the city of Natal existed, the whole coast of what is now Rio Grande do Norte was inhabited by the Potiguara, a people of the great Tupi-Guarani language family that stretched along the coast of the present-day states of Paraíba, Rio Grande do Norte, Ceará and Maranhão. Their name, of Tupi origin, is a portrait of their way of life: 'potï' means 'shrimp' and 'guara', 'eater', so 'potiguara' literally means 'shrimp eater'. That's where the demonym 'potiguar', still used today for anything born in Rio Grande do Norte, comes from.
It's estimated that before the Europeans arrived in 1500, the Potiguara population may have reached several tens of thousands of people spread along the coast. They lived from fishing, hunting, gathering and growing cassava and maize, in villages near the rivers and the sea. Their knowledge of the territory — the river bars, the dunes, the mangroves — would prove decisive in the colonial wars to come.
Through the 16th and 17th centuries, the Potiguara stubbornly resisted the Portuguese colonial project. Far from submitting, they wove strategic alliances with Portugal's enemies: first with the French, who traded brazilwood (pau-brasil) along the coast, and later with the Dutch during the Netherlandish occupation of the Northeast. That resistance made the conquest of the Rio Grande late and bloody, and explains why Natal was only founded at the end of the 16th century, long after other captaincies in the Northeast.
The price of that resistance was extremely high. After the Dutch were definitively expelled in 1654, colonial reprisals and epidemics decimated the Potiguara population, and much of their communities in Rio Grande do Norte vanished from the map or were absorbed. Recognised Potiguara communities persist today above all on the northern coast of Paraíba and at a few points in Rio Grande do Norte, but their trace is engraved forever in the state's demonym and identity.
The origin of Natal is inseparably tied to a fortress. At the end of the 16th century, in the middle of the Iberian Union (when the crowns of Portugal and Spain were joined under Philip II), the need to check the French trading along the coast and to secure the bar of the 'Rio Grande' led to the decision to raise a fortification and found a town near it. Construction of the fort began on 6 January 1598, the day of the Epiphany in the Catholic calendar; for that date, the fortress was named Forte dos Reis Magos, in honour of the three Magi.
The fort was raised in the shape of a star on a sandbank at the mouth of the Potengi River, a strategic position commanding the entrance to the river and the coast. Its star design, typical of the military architecture of the day, let it cover every angle of approach. Almost a year after construction started, on 25 December 1599, the city was officially founded a league from the fortification.
The founding date — Christmas Day — gave the city its name: Natal, which means 'Christmas' in Portuguese. So the capital of Rio Grande do Norte is one of the few large cities in the world whose name literally celebrates the date it was born, a fact the city claims with pride and which underpins its Christmas tradition.
Through its first decades, Natal was a small, poor town, more a military post than a prosperous city. Accounts of the time speak of just a few dozen houses, many roofed with straw, around the fort and the emerging Cidade Alta. Real prosperity would take centuries to arrive, but the Forte dos Reis Magos remained forever the city's 'ground zero': the point from which Natal was born.
In the first decades of the 17th century, the Netherlandish commercial power set its sights on the sugar Northeast of Brazil. The Dutch West India Company, which controlled much of European trade and wanted to control the production and distribution of sugar, launched an offensive on the Brazilian coast. After taking Recife and Pernambuco, the Dutch pushed north.
On 12 June 1633, a Dutch squadron out of Recife — eleven ships and more than 800 men under admiral Jan Cornelissen Lichthardt — invaded Rio Grande do Norte, took the Forte dos Reis Magos and seized Natal. Under Netherlandish control, the town was renamed 'Nova Amsterdã' and the fort itself was for a time called Forte Ceulen. In the year after the invasion, the Dutch also took the region's most important sugar mills, the engenhos of Cunhaú (in present-day Canguaretama) and Ferreiro Torto (in present-day Macaíba).
The Dutch occupation of Rio Grande do Norte ran from 1633 to 1654. It was a period of war, shifting alliances and violence: the Dutch had the support of some of the Potiguara, enemies of the Portuguese, while the population of Natal remained tiny — accounts speak of around 30 houses, mostly roofed with straw. The region was also the stage of tragic episodes, such as the massacres of Cunhaú and Uruaçu (1645), in which Catholic faithful were killed, events for which the Church centuries later recognised the 'Martyrs of Cunhaú and Uruaçu'.
The Dutch presence ended in 1654, when the Netherlanders capitulated and were expelled from the Brazilian Northeast after the campaigns of the 'Insurreição Pernambucana'. With Portuguese control restored, the fortification went back to being called the Forte dos Reis Magos and Natal resumed its slow growth as a Portuguese colonial town.
After the Dutch were expelled, Natal went through almost two centuries of slow, modest growth. It was a small town, peripheral within the vast colonial territory, marked by the droughts of the interior and by a subsistence economy. From that colonial period survive gems such as the Igreja de Santo Antônio — the 'Igreja do Galo' — opened in 1766 by the Portuguese colonisers, one of the oldest churches in the city, baroque in style, famous for the rooster-shaped bronze lightning rod crowning its tower.
The great change came with a crop: cotton, the so-called 'white gold'. Driven by European demand from the textile industry, cotton production transformed the economy of Rio Grande do Norte in the second half of the 19th century. Natal became the outlet for that wealth, and the cotton trade energised the Ribeira district in particular, on the banks of the Potengi River, where a small port shipped out the harvest.
Ribeira then lived its golden age: it filled with trading houses, warehouses, offices and homes, and the city began to modernise to the rhythm of the Belle Époque. From that push came, in the early 20th century, the Teatro Alberto Maranhão (opened in 1904), an elegant art nouveau building on Praça Augusto Severo, a symbol of the Natal that wanted to be European and modern. The city's historic centre — the Cidade Alta and Ribeira districts — still keeps that mosaic of colonial, neoclassical, art deco and modernist architecture.
Administratively, Rio Grande do Norte was for a long time dependent on Pernambuco; the 19th century consolidated Natal as the capital and political centre of the state. Even so, around 1900 it was still a relatively small, quiet city. Nothing suggested that only a few decades later its geography would make it a key point in world history.
The moment Natal entered world history outright came with the Second World War, and the reason was pure geography. Natal is the point of Brazilian territory closest to the African continent: from its 'corner' of the Atlantic, the distance to West Africa is the shortest on the whole American continent. In a war fought on both sides of the ocean, that position made it a strategic link connecting the Americas with the fronts in Europe and Africa.
The government of Getúlio Vargas authorised the installation of a large air base at Parnamirim, in the metropolitan region of Natal. The nucleus of the Natal Air Base was created on 2 March 1942 and activated on 7 August of that same year. There, sharing the same airfield, the United States set up 'Parnamirim Field', which became the largest American air base outside United States territory during the conflict. For its importance, the Allied Forces christened it the 'Trampolim da Vitória' (the 'Springboard of Victory').
From Natal, aircraft took off daily to cross the South Atlantic towards the combat fronts in North Africa and Europe, hugely shortening the transfer routes between the continents. It's estimated that around 20,000 aircraft passed through the base during the war years, a figure that gives the scale of the military traffic the city saw. Natal then went through an accelerated transformation: the arrival of thousands of American soldiers changed daily life, the economy and even the culture of the city, in what many historians call the 'Americanisation' of Natal.
That chapter left a deep mark. There was even a famous episode: in January 1943, US president Franklin D. Roosevelt and Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas met in Natal (the so-called 'Conferência de Natal' or 'Conferência do Potengi') to coordinate Brazil's participation in the war. Today, the Natal Air Base and various memorials recall that role of the city as the 'Trampolim da Vitória', a historical pride still invoked.
Once the war was over, Natal entered a new stage. The infrastructure inherited from the military presence — especially the Parnamirim airport, for a long time the city's main one — and the contact with the world left by the 'Americanisation' helped project the city. Through the second half of the 20th century, Natal grew, urbanised and began to look towards its greatest asset: its beaches, its dunes and its near-permanent sun.
From the late 20th century, tourism became one of the city's engines. The consolidation of Ponta Negra as a beach resort, the building of the Via Costeira with its large seafront resorts (skirting the Parque das Dunas), and the popularity of buggy rides over the Genipabu dunes and along the Litoral Sul turned Natal into one of the most visited beach destinations in Brazil's Northeast. The city earned the nickname 'Cidade do Sol' for its roughly 300 days of sun a year.
A new leap came in the 21st century with the opening, in 2014, of Governador Aluízio Alves International Airport (NAT), in the neighbouring municipality of São Gonçalo do Amarante, which replaced the old Parnamirim airport as the region's air gateway. That same year, Natal was one of the host cities of the 2014 football World Cup in Brazil, which drove building work and greater international visibility.
Today Natal combines its two souls: that of the modern beach resort — Ponta Negra, the Morro do Careca, the resorts, the buggies and the trips to Maracajaú, Pirangi and Pipa — and that of the historic city born on Christmas Day 1599, watched over by the old star-shaped Forte dos Reis Magos. Potiguar capital, 'Cidade do Sol' and former 'Trampolim da Vitória', Natal is a destination where beach, nature and memory live side by side on the banks of the Potengi and the shore of the Atlantic.