Things to do
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Aquário Natural
The spring head of the Rio Baía Bonita, where water rises through sand at a constant temperature and stays clear enough to count the fish. Snorkellers drift downstream past dourado and piraputanga, floating rather than kicking so the silt is left on the bed.
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Balneário Municipal
A stretch of the Rio Formoso fenced off as a public bathing park, with grass, jetties and shoals of dourado and piraputanga that swim between the swimmers. It is the cheapest water in Bonito and the one place locals use as much as visitors do.
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Abismo Anhumas
A shaft in the limestone entered by abseiling seventy two metres down a rope to a lake at the bottom, where the floor carries calcite cones several storeys high. Numbers are capped daily and a practice descent the evening before is compulsory.
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Boca da Onça
A trail along the Serra da Bodoquena escarpment that passes eleven waterfalls and ends at the highest fall in Mato Grosso do Sul, a drop of about a hundred and fifty six metres. The walk takes most of a day, and a rappel down the face runs from the same base.
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Buraco das Araras
A sinkhole a hundred metres deep and five hundred across, one of the largest of its kind in Brazil, ringed by a private reserve with two viewing decks over the drop. Red and green macaws nest in the red walls and cross the hole through the morning.
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Gruta do Lago Azul
A limestone cave reached by a steep stair down to a lake of deep blue water below the entrance, coloured by dissolved limestone and magnesium. Direct sun reaches the water only for a few weeks around the turn of the year, and those mornings sell out first.
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Hotel Cabanas
A long established hotel on the road out to the balneário, set in its own reserve of native forest with a bird garden, horses and a trail down to the Rio Formoso. It sits a short drive from town rather than in it, which is the trade for the setting.
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Park
Parque Nacional da Serra da Bodoquena
Seventy six thousand hectares of dry forest and limestone hill protecting the springs that make every river around Bonito run clear. Access is tightly limited and much of it has no visitor infrastructure, so most travellers meet it through the reserves on its edge.
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Rio da Prata
A flotation route on a private ranch south of Bonito: a walk in through gallery forest to a spring, then a slow drift down the Olho d'Água and on into the Rio da Prata, about three kilometres in all, watching shoals of piraputanga pass at arm's length.
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Rio Sucuri
One of the clearest rivers in Brazil, rising from a spring on a cattle farm and running about eighteen hundred metres to its meeting with the Formoso. Snorkellers float the whole length with the current, over waving beds of water plants and among the fish.