Quilombo and Caiçara Heritage Around Paraty on the Costa Verde

Most visitors meet Paraty as a picture: whitewashed colonial houses, a bell tower against green water, wooden boats drawn up on the sand. That picture is real, and it is lovely, but it is only the surface of something older and far more human. The quilombo and caiçara heritage of Paraty is the living culture underneath — the communities of formerly enslaved Africans, of coastal fishing families, and of Indigenous Guarani, whose lives have shaped this coast for centuries and who still farm, fish, sing and struggle here today. Learning even a little of that story is the difference between looking at the Costa Verde and actually meeting it.

This is a piece I wanted to write with some care, because these communities are too often flattened into a postcard — a fisherman in a dugout canoe, a drum circle photographed and forgotten — when the reality is a resilient, complicated and pressured web of living cultures. My aim is to introduce who these peoples are, where their traditions come from, what they make and eat and dance, where you can encounter them around Paraty, the very real pressures they face over land, and, above all, how to visit in a way that treats them as neighbours rather than scenery.

I write as a host who lives on the hillside above the Bay of Paraty and has spent years in and around this coast, with affection and a great deal still to learn. Take what follows as an invitation to look more closely and travel more thoughtfully, not as the last word. These communities tell their own story best; the most a good host can do is encourage you to go, spend well and listen properly.

Three peoples, one coast

To understand the culture of this coast you have to understand that it was made by three peoples, arriving in three very different ways, over several centuries. The oldest layer is Indigenous: the Tupi-Guarani peoples who lived, fished and farmed these bays and forests long before any European sail appeared on the horizon. Much of what is still distinctive on the coast — the dugout canoe, manioc as the staple crop, a precise reading of tides and forest — descends directly from them.

The second layer is Portuguese. In the colonial period Paraty grew into a port of real importance, and in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it became the coastal end of the Caminho do Ouro, the Gold Trail, down which gold from the mines of Minas Gerais was hauled over the mountains to be shipped to Lisbon. That trade built the elegant town you walk through today, and our guide to the historic centre and the piece on the Caminho do Ouro tell that part of the story in full.

The third layer is African, and it is inseparable from the second. The gold economy, the port and the plantations all depended on the labour of enslaved Africans, brought to this coast in large numbers during the era of slavery. When the gold faded and slavery was finally abolished in 1888, the region was left with a population formed from all three peoples, a far quieter economy, and — crucially — communities of Black families who stayed on the land and built new lives on it. Those communities are the quilombos, and they are where this story properly begins.

The bays of Paraty look the way they do because the people who have lived here longest took only what the forest and the tide could spare.

The quilombos: what they are and why they matter

A quilombo, in its origin, was a community founded by people who freed themselves from slavery, or who were left on the land when a failing estate was abandoned around them. Across Brazil these communities took root in forests, valleys and remote coasts, holding on to language, farming, music and faith through generations of neglect and dispute. Their descendants today are called quilombolas, and since the country's 1988 constitution they have had a recognised, if hard-won, right to the land their ancestors occupied.

This matters on the Costa Verde because one of Brazil's most important quilombola communities sits right here, on the road between the highway and the town. Quilombola heritage is distinct from caiçara heritage — it is defined specifically by descent from enslaved Africans and by the collective struggle for land — but on this coast the two are woven together, both rooted in the African strand of the region's history, and both named explicitly as part of what earned Paraty and Ilha Grande their joint UNESCO World Heritage listing in 2019, Brazil's first so-called mixed site, recognised for its nature and its living culture at once.

Campinho da Independência

The Quilombo do Campinho da Independência began near the end of the nineteenth century, in the years around abolition. The land had been part of an estate — the Fazenda da Independência — and when its owners walked away, the enslaved families who had worked it were left behind on it. The community that grew there traces its founding to three women, two sisters and a cousin, who held the group together and passed down both a matriarchal structure and a direct family lineage; the community's family units descend from those founding women to this day. That female backbone is still something residents speak about with pride.

What makes Campinho historically significant is the fight for its land. Through the 1960s and 1970s, as the BR-101 highway opened this coast to resorts, second homes and speculation, the community faced a fierce dispute over territory it had held for generations. After decades of resistance, in 1999 Campinho da Independência became the first quilombola community in the state of Rio de Janeiro to win definitive legal title to its land — a territory of a little under three hundred hectares — and for years it stood as the only titled quilombo in the state. It is, in a very real sense, a landmark in Brazil's long reckoning with the legacy of slavery.

Visiting Campinho, and doing it right

Campinho is also one of the most accessible ways to meet this heritage, because the community itself decided, years ago, to welcome visitors on its own terms. It runs its own cultural tourism: guided walks that explain the history and the plants, a women's craft cooperative producing baskets and woven work, a community restaurant serving traditional food grown and cooked locally, and presentations of music and story. The point of doing it this way is that the residents design the experience and keep the income, so tourism strengthens the community rather than hollowing it out.

The respectful way to go is to arrange your visit in advance through the community's own programme, rather than turning up unannounced to wander around what is, after all, a living village and people's homes. Come with time and curiosity, eat the food, buy directly from the makers, and listen more than you photograph. A morning at Campinho, followed by an afternoon and a swim back at the chalet, is one of the most quietly memorable days this coast offers, and it costs a fraction of a boat charter while giving far more back to the place you are visiting.

Jongo: the drum, the circle and the coded song

If there is one tradition that carries the spirit of the quilombos on this coast, it is jongo. Jongo is an Afro-Brazilian music-and-dance form of the southeast, born on the coffee plantations of the Paraíba Valley between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and in the Black communities that outlived them. At its centre are drums — usually two or three, hand-played — a lead singer calling out verses, a circle of people answering and clapping, and pairs dancing in the middle who mark their turn with the umbigada, the touch that passes the dance from one person to the next.

What makes jongo more than a folk dance is what is buried inside the song. In the time of slavery the sung verses, the pontos, doubled as coded language: full of words of African origin and layered meaning, they let enslaved people communicate past the understanding of the masters, who feared and often banned the night-time drum circles precisely because they sensed something organised in them. To watch a jongo today is to watch a tradition that was once an act of resistance, kept alive across generations as memory, celebration and identity all at once.

Jongo was recognised by IPHAN, Brazil's heritage institute, as intangible cultural heritage of the country in 2005, under the name Jongo do Sudeste. It lives on in both rural quilombos and city neighbourhoods, and it has a real presence here on the southern coast of Rio de Janeiro, in Angra dos Reis and around Paraty. You are most likely to encounter it at a community event, a quilombola celebration or a festival rather than a staged show, which is exactly as it should be — jongo belongs to a circle of people, not a stage.

The caiçara: people of the forest and the tide

Alongside the quilombos, and often intertwined with them, are the caiçara — the traditional coastal fishing people of southeastern Brazil, found all along the shores of São Paulo, Paraná and the south of Rio de Janeiro, including Paraty and Angra dos Reis. The caiçara are not a single ethnic group but the product of the same threefold mixing that made the whole coast: Indigenous, Portuguese and African. The word itself comes from Tupi, from a term for a fence of stakes once used in fishing, and over generations it shifted from the structure to the people and their whole way of life. Our dedicated guide to caiçara culture goes deeper; here I want to place them alongside the quilombos and the Guarani as one strand of a shared heritage.

What has always defined the caiçara is that they never lived from the sea alone. Theirs is a culture of combination — artisanal fishing together with small-scale manioc farming, gathering in the forest, and handicraft — and it left a famously light footprint on the coast. For generations, cut off by the mountains and reachable mainly by boat, these communities lived in a kind of seclusion that is precisely why so much survived: the canoes, the fishing knowledge, the food and the village life endured because the modern world arrived here late.

Fishing, canoes and the working life

The image at the centre of caiçara identity is the canoe, carved from a single trunk in a tradition descended from the Indigenous dugout and refined over centuries. It is not decorative but the working heart of the fishing life, and the craft of making one — choosing the tree, felling it, hollowing and shaping it by hand — is bound so tightly to caiçara identity that it has moved toward formal recognition as part of Brazil's heritage. The fishing itself is artisanal in the truest sense: small boats, hand-lines and nets, and the shallows worked by hand at low tide for oysters, mussels and small shellfish, often gathered by the women of the community.

Caiçara food

Caiçara cooking is one of the most rewarding ways into the culture, and it is exactly what you would expect from a people of the forest and the sea. Manioc — cassava — is the foundation inherited from the Indigenous past, appearing as toasted farinha scattered over everything and as pirão, the thick savoury porridge made by stirring that flour into fish broth. The proteins are fish and shellfish, and the regional signature is moqueca, a slow-cooked stew built on coconut milk with the day's catch. Eaten in a community kitchen on a quiet beach, near the water it came from, a caiçara moqueca is one of the genuine food experiences of a trip here. If the cooking draws you in, our Paraty restaurants guide and the journal piece on Brazilian gastronomy carry the wider story of how to eat well along this coast.

Fandango and ciranda: the sung, danced heritage of the coast

Where the quilombos carry jongo, the caiçara carry fandango. The fandango caiçara is the coastal fishing communities' own tradition of music, dance and poetry, with roots reaching back to the eighteenth century and to the same Indigenous, European and African mixing that made the people themselves. It is played on the viola caiçara — a small, distinctive stringed instrument — along with the rabeca fiddle, the hand drum called the adufo, and in its danced form the rhythmic stamp of wooden clogs, the tamancos, on a plank floor. IPHAN registered fandango caiçara as Brazilian intangible cultural heritage in 2012.

What I find moving about fandango is how tied it is to work. The tradition grew up alongside the mutirão, the communal work gathering, where neighbours came together to clear a field or raise a house and the line between labour and celebration blurred: the work done by day, the fandango played into the night. It is a culture in which making a living and making music were never really separate things. The related ciranda, a circle dance, has a strong presence on the southern coast of Rio de Janeiro and especially around Paraty, and the two forms are close enough that heritage bodies have even discussed registering them together.

Like jongo, fandango is best met where it actually lives — at a community celebration, a saint's-day feast or a cultural event, rather than a performance laid on for tourists. If you happen to be here when one is on, go, sit at the edge, and let it unfold at its own pace. Our guide to Paraty's festivals covers the public feasts through the year where you are most likely to catch it.

The Guarani: the first people and the land without evil

The oldest heritage of all on this coast is Indigenous, and it is not only in the past. The Guarani Mbya still live in the Paraty region, on demarcated land in villages such as Paraty-Mirim and Araponga, where families farm manioc, corn, beans and sweet potatoes much as their ancestors did, and where a state school teaches children in the Guarani language alongside Portuguese. The village at Paraty-Mirim numbers something on the order of thirty-odd families, a living community rather than a relic.

The Guarani relationship with this landscape is spiritual as much as practical. In Mbya belief, the forest is chosen ground: villages are founded in places felt to be close to the celestial world, on the path toward yvy marãey, the land without evil, a central idea in Guarani cosmology. It is no accident that the Guarani are among the most effective stewards of what remains of the Mata Atlântica, the Atlantic Forest — one of the most biodiverse and most threatened ecosystems on earth, of which only a fraction of the original cover survives, much of it on exactly this coast. To understand the forest that frames every view here, our journal piece on Atlantic Forest wildlife is a good companion.

Some Guarani villages receive visitors, through organised and respectful cultural tourism, where you can learn about the language, the crafts, the medicinal plants and the worldview directly from residents. As with the quilombo and the caiçara communities, this only works well when it is arranged properly, on the community's terms, and approached as a genuine exchange rather than a photo stop. These are people in their own home, teaching visitors something precious, not an exhibit.

A living heritage under pressure

It would be dishonest to present any of this as a charming survival untouched by the modern world. Quilombola, caiçara and Guarani communities alike live under real and growing pressure, and how visitors travel either eases or worsens it.

The deepest tension is over land and access. Much of the coast where these communities have always lived now falls inside conservation units — state parks, ecological reserves and protected areas such as the Cairuçu area south of town — the very designations that helped earn the region its world-heritage status. The intention behind those protections is good, but the rules can collide with traditional life, restricting the fishing, gathering, building and small-scale farming that families have practised for generations, and sometimes leaving long-resident communities in a precarious legal position on land they have held informally for centuries. Across this coast, environmental law and traditional livelihood have repeatedly found themselves at odds.

Layered on top is the pressure of tourism and property. The same beauty that draws visitors drives up the value of coastal land, and communities without formal title can be squeezed by speculation, resort development and the slow transformation of working villages into holiday backdrops. The opening of the BR-101 highway in the 1970s was the turning point that put much of this in motion, and it is exactly the dispute that Campinho da Independência had to fight and, in its case, win. Tourism is not the enemy here — done well it can be a lifeline, replacing lost farm income and giving young people a reason to stay. Done badly, it hollows a community out, turning residents into staff and culture into performance.

There is also a quieter pressure that makes no headlines: the steady departure of the young. When fishing or farming alone cannot support a family, young people leave for the cities, and each one who goes carries away a thread of knowledge — how to read a fishing ground, carve a canoe, sing a ponto, cook a dish the way a grandmother did. A culture transmitted by doing rather than writing is only ever one generation from real loss. This is why, for all three peoples, livelihood and culture are the same question: a community that cannot make a living on its own land cannot keep its way of life either. The encouraging counter-current is community-based tourism designed and run by residents, which gives the young an economic reason to value the very knowledge that might otherwise feel like a relic.

How to visit respectfully

If you take one thing from this piece, let it be this: go to these communities as a guest, not a spectator. The difference is everything, and it is mostly a matter of attitude backed by a few concrete choices.

• Choose community-run tourism. Seek out visits, guides and experiences organised by the communities themselves — Campinho's own programme, caiçara boatmen and cooks, Guarani villages that receive guests. When residents set the terms and keep the income, your trip supports the culture instead of eroding it.
• Spend locally and directly. Bring cash. Eat the community food, buy handicrafts from the people who made them, hire local guides and boatmen, and pay fairly. The money you spend this way is the single most useful thing your visit does.
• Ask before you photograph people. The villages are photogenic and the temptation is strong, but a fisherman, a woman weaving, a child playing, a jongo circle — these are people in their own home, not subjects. Ask first, and respect a no. Our photography guide says more on this.
• Tread lightly, literally. Many of these places sit in protected areas with fragile surroundings and little infrastructure. Carry out your rubbish, respect the forest and the water, and remember you are in a living village and a conservation unit at once.
• Slow down and listen. The point is not to tick off a quilombo or a fishing village but to spend real, unhurried time — share a meal, ask questions, learn a little of the history and the present. The communities that welcome visitors do so generously; meet that generosity with patience rather than a checklist.

None of this is complicated. It is, in the end, the difference between visiting people and consuming a view, and the travellers who get it right are the ones who come away most moved. If you would like help arranging a respectful day — the right community programme, a good local guide, the sensible order to do things in — our tours page and our team can point you the right way; just get in touch and we will set it up properly.

A calendar of living culture

You do not have to wait for a festival to meet this heritage — a community-based visit works any week of the year — but the public celebrations are a wonderful way in, and they are worth planning around if your dates are flexible. The great fixed point is the Festa do Divino, the Feast of the Divine Holy Spirit, which fills Paraty around Pentecost with processions, folk music, food and colour, and which the whole community, caiçara and quilombola included, shares. The town's saints' days and its calendar of religious feasts bring their own processions and music through the year.

November carries particular weight, around Black Consciousness Day on the twentieth, when quilombola communities and Black cultural groups across Brazil mark the memory of resistance to slavery — a natural moment to encounter jongo and quilombola culture with the seriousness it deserves. Paraty's better-known cultural calendar, from the literary festival FLIP to its cachaça and cultural events, sits alongside all of this; our festivals guide lays out the year, and the piece on the best time to visit Paraty helps you weigh the seasons. Whenever you come, ask locally what is on while you are here — the community events that matter most are often the least advertised.

Where the heritage sits on the map

Part of what makes this coast so rich is how close together these communities lie, and how naturally a few days can take in all three heritages. Campinho da Independência sits inland of the town, off the road toward the highway, an easy drive that pairs well with the waterfalls and cachaça stills of the same stretch. The Guarani village at Paraty-Mirim lies down the coast to the south, near the water. The caiçara communities are scattered along the bays and beaches — at Praia do Sono, reachable only by boat or forest trail, and deep in the Saco do Mamanguá, the long inlet often called Brazil's only tropical fjord, where small fishing families still live by the tide.

It helps to remember how much of this coast was connected by water rather than road. For the caiçara especially, the bay has always been the highway — the way to the next village, the market in town, the good fishing grounds. A day spent moving between coves by boat, as residents always have, gives you a truer sense of the culture than any single stop, and our guide to the boat tours explains how to travel the bay the way it has always been travelled. From the water, or from the hillside above it, the whole picture reads as one living landscape: forested ridges, green bays, the villages tucked into the folds of the coast.

Getting here, from São Paulo, Rio and abroad

Paraty sits about midway along the Costa Verde, on the coastal road between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, which makes it reachable from both of Brazil's biggest cities in a single, scenic drive. From Rio de Janeiro it is roughly four hours by car or bus along the BR-101, the same highway whose arrival once reshaped this coast. From São Paulo it is a little longer, in the region of five to six hours depending on traffic and route, often via the mountains and the coast road. Our journal pieces on reaching the town from Rio and the practicalities of planning a Brazil trip go into the logistics.

Travellers from abroad will almost always fly into Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo and continue overland; there is no large commercial airport at Paraty itself, which is part of why the town and its communities kept their character. Build in a little patience for the last stretch — the coast road is beautiful but winding — and treat the journey as part of the experience rather than a chore. However you arrive, once you are here the town is compact and walkable, and the surrounding communities are all within a manageable day's reach, which is exactly what makes Paraty such a good base for this kind of slow, cultural travelling. For a wider view of what fills the days, our overview of things to explore in Paraty lays out the options.

Basing yourself above the bay

There is a quiet connection between staying somewhere like our chalet on the hillside above the Bay of Paraty and the communities below. From the deck, some four hundred metres up, the coast reads as a single living landscape — the forested ridges, the green water, the small boats working the coves, the three horizons of Paraty, Angra dos Reis and Ilha Grande laid out at once. The quilombola, caiçara and Guarani peoples are a large part of why that view still looks the way it does: their light-touch ways of life are why these bays remain forested, fished and alive rather than built over and emptied out.

The practical appeal is simple. You can spend a morning at Campinho, or a day among the caiçara beaches of the Mamanguá, or an afternoon learning from a Guarani village, and then climb back up the hill to the infinity pool, a swim and a long evening with the whole bay in front of you. A base you return to, rather than a place you are always leaving, is what lets you travel this coast slowly enough to actually meet it — to eat what the tide brought in, to sit through a jongo or a fandango without watching the clock, to let a conversation run long. That, to me, is what travelling the heritage of the Costa Verde should feel like. When you are ready to plan it, browse all there is to explore in Paraty, and come and see this coast, and its people, on their own terms.

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