Paraty

Paraty's colonial engineers built several of the town's streets with a deliberate slope toward the sea, letting the high tide flow in and flush accumulated waste and debris back out with the outgoing water. It was a practical sanitation solution for a small 18th-century port, and three centuries later, streets like Rua da Lapa still flood on schedule with the tide, now treated as a local curiosity that visitors time their walks around rather than a problem anyone's trying to fix.

The town owes its original wealth and layout to the Caminho do Ouro, the Gold Trail, a route that carried gold mined in Minas Gerais down through the mountains to Paraty's port for shipment back to Portugal during the 18th-century gold boom. Sections of the original stone-paved trail still survive in the hills above town, and guided hikes along preserved stretches give a direct sense of how the gold actually moved before Rio de Janeiro's port eventually took over that role.

UNESCO added Paraty and the surrounding Serra da Bocaina to its World Heritage list in 2019, a joint designation covering both the town's well-preserved colonial architecture and the biodiversity of the Atlantic Forest surrounding it. The historic center's whitewashed buildings with brightly painted door and window frames remain largely intact, and cars are barred from much of it, leaving the cobblestone streets to pedestrians, bicycles, and the tide.

Paraty sits along Brazil's Costa Verde, the Green Coast, a stretch of coastline dotted with dozens of small islands and secluded beaches reachable only by boat. Day trips out of Paraty's harbor are the standard way to see them, with schooner-style boats running loop routes that stop for swimming at several islands over the course of an afternoon.

The town has produced cachaça, Brazil's sugarcane spirit, since the colonial era, and a number of small distilleries around Paraty still operate using traditional methods, some open for tours and tastings that trace the drink's production from cane to bottle.