Paraty and Ilha Grande – Culture and Biodiversity

Gold once left Brazil through Paraty: in the late 17th century the port town anchored the Caminho do Ouro, the route that carried the wealth of the inland mines toward Europe. Its grid of whitewashed 18th-century streets survives almost intact, backed today by four Atlantic Forest reserves sheltering jaguars, white-lipped peccaries and the southern muriqui, an emblematic and threatened primate. UNESCO inscribed this pairing of colonial town and biodiversity hotspot as a mixed World Heritage Site in 2019.