Parati Travel Video Guide

Parati Travel Itinerary

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About 300km from Rio on the BR-101 is the Costa Verde's main attraction, the town of PARATI . Inhabited since 1650, Parati (or more correctly, Vila de Nossa Senhora dos Remedios de Paraty) has remained fundamentally unaltered since its heyday as a staging post for the eighteenth-century trade in Brazilian gold, passing from Minas Gerais to Portugal. Before white settlement, the land had been occupied by the Guaiana Indians , and the gold routes followed the old Indian trails down to Parati and its sheltered harbour. Inland raids and pirate attacks necessitated the establishment of a new route linking Minas Gerais directly with Rio de Janeiro, and, as trade was diverted to Rio, Parati's fortunes declined. Apart from a short-lived coffee-shipping boom in the nineteenth century, Parati remained hidden away off the beaten track, quietly stagnating but intact. Nowadays, though, UNESCO considers Parati to represent one of the world's most important examples of Portuguese colonial architecture, and the entire city has been elevated to the status of a national monument.

Today, Parati is very much alive, with its population of 15,000 involved in fishing, farming and tourism. The town centre was one of Brazil's first planned urban projects, and its narrow cobbled streets, out of bounds to

motorized transport, are bordered by houses built around courtyards, adorned with brightly coloured flowers and alive with hummingbirds. The cobbles of the streets are arranged in channels to drain off storm water and allow the sea to enter and wash the streets at high tides and full moon. There's an air of prosperity in Parati, as there is in Buzios, yet it has a much more democratic feel to it, and by and large provides a more satisfying experience than its chic counterpart on the Costa do Sol

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