The coast of the Rio Grande do Norte has a bit of everything, including a beach, Sibaúma, that was once old Quilombo (slave village), and which today still keeps its characteristics in the black skin of its natives, the majority which are fishermen or carnival workers. Sibaúma is a beautiful beach, with a calm sea, bordered to the south by the river Catú, which separates it from the beach of Bar do Cunhaú and has on its coast a great and beautiful series of high bluffs (falésias).

Nobody knows precisely the origin of Sibaúma, as a quilombo, but some researchers believe that it was the resultant of slaves escaped from the sugar mills of Cunhaú, of Goianinha or Canguaretama. The natives, however, do not believe this history. For them, they are descendents of a Portuguese navigator and an Indian woman, from a tribe who inhabited the edges of the river Catú and whose children had married black men.

During much time, the village lived isolated, almost without contact and, to arrive there, except by the way the sea or passage on the river, they had a small dirt road (track) that gave access to the community, also poor, at that time, to Pipa and Tibau do Sul. Community equipment (facilities) such as schools, health, lights, telephone and energy were things that were never imagined. By the way, almost nobody knew what they were. The population was illiterate, the common illnesses were dealt with using "meisinha", the base native plants and the more serious cases were taken for Cunhaú, being the closest.

At the meeting of the river with the sea, a beautiful coqueiral makes the difference. The strong and permanent sun has two ways to bronze the skin, on the beach at the edge of the sea or along the edges of the river, accompanied by the movement of the rafts carrying the cars that go or come along the south coast.

Those who visit Pipa never imagine that only eight kilometers distant of that international kitchen of tourists who invade that point, is a community formed of 500 people of black color that live and until recent time had little or no contact with the civilized world. Still it is a sea of tranquility, also agitates by the high seasons in Barra do Cunhaú. It is a typical place for the summer living. Tourism is only one day. There hotels do not exist and only now small inns have started to function.

Therefore, for the tourist, an advice, visit the beach during the day, but to eat and to sleep, consider the options offered by its neighboring beaches. Or, it makes sense, spend the night in Pipa, pass the day in Sibaúma and then cross the river to lunch in the good restaurants that exist in the other edge (Barra do Cunhaú).

But nobody should be deceived, tourism is already modifying Sibaúma, with the arrival of a new highway, counting on resources of the World Bank, Banco do Nordeste and the State Government, through the program Prodetur II. The highway which will link and a new bridge over the river Catú, which will shorten the distance to Barra do Cunhaú. Therefore, inside of two years, all Sibaúma will change, with new hotels and restaurants already programmed , remaining only in the memory of its old inhabitants, the old times where it was considered only one Quilombo (slave village).