This Beautiful Brazilian Port Town Has Cobblestone Streets, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and Great Food

"There is, for starters, the trancelike stupor that takes hold the moment you glimpse the town, its candy-colored Portuguese-colonial buildings emerging from a landscape of jungle-clad mountains and jade-green water. Then there is the heat-thick, luscious, sedating-to say nothing of the numerous places to sample cachaça, the potent spirit distilled in the area."

"This mode of enforced relaxation is largely why Paraty, which sits midway between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo inside a tropical fjord-one of only four in the world-has long held sway over Brazilians looking to unwind. Leisure, however, was far from the minds of the Portuguese who settled in the region in the late 1500s. They came in search of gold; eventually, in the 1690s, they found it, some 400 miles away in the mountains of Minas Gerais. At that point Paraty evolved into a prosperous port defined by the same forces that shaped much of Brazil's history and culture: Indigenous peoples, European colonists, and enslaved Africans."

Paraty forces visitors into a slow pace through trancelike vistas of candy-colored Portuguese-colonial buildings set against jungle-clad mountains and jade-green water. Heat, humidity and abundant cachaça tasting spots add to the town's languid atmosphere. Massive, irregular cobblestones often teeming with tiny mangrove crabs make slow walking unavoidable. Paraty sits midway between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo inside a tropical fjord. Portuguese settlers arrived in the late 1500s seeking gold, and the town later prospered as a port shaped by Indigenous peoples, European colonists and enslaved Africans. Decline after abolition and coffee industrialization left Paraty largely abandoned by the mid-20th century.

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