The park's main draw is its field of towering dunes interspersed with more than 30,000 freshwater pools, known locally as lençóis, or bedsheets. The pools form each year during the rainy season, which runs from January to May, filling the hollows between the dunes before gradually drying out later in the year.

São Luís itself has built a reputation distinct from the dunes that bring most travelers to the region. Five of its neighborhoods together make up what is described as the largest urban quilombo in Latin America, a reference to communities descended from escaped enslaved people that have preserved distinct cultural traditions. The city has also earned the nickname "Brazilian Jamaica" for a reggae music scene that took root decades ago and remains a fixture of its nightlife.

Visitors are pointed toward the Circuito Rancharia tour as a way to see the dunes and lagoons up close, alongside local dishes such as sarnambi, a shellfish preparation, and peixada maranhense, a regional fish stew. The São João festival, a monthlong tradition elsewhere in Brazil, runs considerably longer in Maranhão, stretching across 70 days beginning in late May.

The new flight routes give UK travelers their first direct path into a region that had largely required connections through Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo to reach. The writer of this account traveled as a guest of Maranhão Tourism.