Paraty

Several times a year, on a full or a new moon, the sea comes up through the streets of the centro histórico and the whole place turns to shallow canals under whitewashed walls. The Portuguese built it to do that. The streets sit below the tide line on a slight fall and the house floors half a metre above them, so the water runs in, lifts the dirt off the pé-de-moleque stones and goes back out with the moon.

Paraty was founded in 1667, and by the end of that century it was the last stop on the Caminho do Ouro, the road that carried gold down from the Minas Gerais mines for shipping to Europe. The port worked in the other direction too, landing tools and the enslaved Africans sent up to those mines, and the eighteenth-century street plan and most of the colonial building it carried have survived intact. In July 2019 Paraty and Ilha Grande went onto the World Heritage list as Brazil's first mixed site, culture and nature together, across eight municipalities in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo; the Atlantic Forest inside it holds 57 per cent of the region's endemic birds, along with jaguar, white-lipped peccary and spider monkeys. The bay has fifty beaches, some reachable by road and many only by boat, and the boat-only ones still live off caiçara fishing and craft. Two years before the World Heritage listing, in October 2017, Paraty joined the UNESCO Creative Cities network as a city of gastronomy.