The name is older than any of this. It comes from Old Tupi - maragûaóîy, from maragûaó, wildcat, and îy, river - the river of wildcats, which is what the people living here called the watercourse long before sugar or tourism arrived. The settlement itself went through two other names first. It was Gamela, then it was renamed Isabel when it was founded as a town on 24 April 1875, and it became an independent municipality in 1892. Today it holds about 32,000 people across 335 square kilometres of coast and hinterland, roughly 125 kilometres north of Maceió on the AL-101 and about halfway to Recife. For most of its history it was a farming and fishing place that happened to have a reef offshore.

Everything here runs on the tables. Getting the Galés right means going at low water, which shifts by roughly fifty minutes a day, which means the entire tourism economy of the town reschedules itself daily. Boats are booked around it, restaurants fill around it, and the crews who take people out read the tide the way farmers read weather. Bring your own mask if you have one; there are rentals, and there are photographers who work the pools. Closer in, the reef shows up again at São Bento beach, where coral formations locally called the C'roas sit within reach of the shore. Camacho beach, south of the main town beach and reachable on foot, is where you go when you want the water without the boats.

Maragogi is one of the Alagoas municipalities inside the Área de Proteção Ambiental Costa dos Corais, established by federal decree on 23 October 1997. The APA covers more than 413,000 hectares along about 135 kilometres of coastline between Tamandaré in Pernambuco and Maceió, spanning a string of municipalities in both states, and it is the largest marine protected area in Brazil. Managed by ICMBio, it protects the reef complex, the estuaries and mangroves behind it, and the endangered Antillean manatee. Fishing is prohibited in designated zones, and the rules on the Galés - how many boats, where they may anchor, what visitors may touch - are the reason there is still coral out there to look at. A reef that draws thousands of visitors a year survives only if the visiting is governed.

Maragogi did not grow up as a resort. Tourism only began in earnest in the 1980s and picked up sharply after the Salinas de Maragogi hotel opened in 1989, which is recent enough that plenty of people in town remember the before. By 2022 it had become the leading destination on the northern Alagoas coast. The climate helps: a tropical humid classification, an annual mean around 25.5 °C and about 1,397 millimetres of rain a year, which is enough to keep the hinterland green without drowning the season. What has not happened - yet - is the wall of high-rise that swallowed other Northeastern beach towns. The town centre is still walkable in twenty minutes, with a bank, a bus terminal, and a beach at the end of most streets.

The vans are the best thing about staying here. From the Terminal Rodoviário they run north every five minutes or so toward Barra Grande and Peroba, and south every fifteen toward Japaratinga and Porto Calvo, and outside the town limits there are no fixed stops at all - you flag one down wherever you are standing, and you get out wherever you like. Fares run to a few reais. The last van back from Peroba goes at 17:30, which is the one piece of the timetable worth memorising. Getting to Maragogi in the first place is easier from Maceió, where vans leave the bus station directly, than from Recife, which involves changing at Barreiros and then again at São José da Coroa Grande. Going south to São Miguel dos Milagres means a van, a mototaxi, and a free ferry across at Porto de Pedras.