The concern with land use and occupation is of paramount importance for the environmental management of cities, as their disordered growth can generate profound ecological imbalances. In view of this, environmental protection areas (APA) were created to help protect biological diversity and the sustainable use of natural resources in a locality. In Maranhão, the Maracanã APA is a very important area for maintaining the ecological balance of the state, despite this it has been noticed in recent years that there is a significant loss of vegetation cover on the site, a considerable expansion of urbanisation in addition to the change in the natural landscape. To identify this, a study will be carried out with the aid of geoprocessing tools to map land use and occupation in the Maracanã APA, using satellite images, georeferenced Google Earth images for the construction of thematic maps and visual interpretation of images through QuantumGis2.14.0, in the period 2009 and 2015.