The hook
A whitewashed colonial port between the mountains and a bay full of islands, with streets of enormous uneven cobbles that the sea deliberately floods at the highest tides and then drains, washing the town clean.
01Why it's worth it
Paraty was built to ship gold out of Minas Gerais, and when that trade moved the town stopped growing — which is why the centre is still an eighteenth-century grid of low white houses with brightly painted doors and no cars. The paving is the strange part. The streets are laid with pé de moleque, boulder-sized stones set at a deliberate slope, and at spring tides seawater comes up through the grid and runs through the streets before draining back out. It is a functioning piece of colonial sanitary engineering that has become the town's signature image.
The bay is the other half. Schooners run day trips out to a scatter of islands and calm green coves, and the Serra da Bocaina rises straight up behind the town with waterfalls and cachaça distilleries along the old Gold Trail — a stone road that mule trains once carried bullion down, still walkable in sections.
On the crowds and the prices, plainly. This is not a discovery. The traveller quoted below calls it one of the most beautiful towns they have seen and one of the most touristy in the same breath, and food and lodging cost noticeably more here than elsewhere in Brazil. It is worth going anyway; it is not worth going expecting to have it to yourself.
02How to experience it
Stay two nights in or near the historic centre and walk it early, before the day buses. Take a schooner into the bay for a day. Walk part of the Caminho do Ouro, and visit a distillery if you like cachaça — the local stuff is a long way from what gets exported. Bring shoes with grip; the cobbles are genuinely hard to walk on, and worse wet.
From the locals
A Belgian traveller on r/travel set out to write about the stretch of coast south of Rio that the rest of the thread had skipped, and Paraty is what they wrote about: "an old colonial town with cobbled streets and whitewashed houses, one of the most picturesque towns I've ever seen." Their comparison is their own — "I'm Belgian, so I would call this town the 'Brazilian Bruges', that's how cool it is."
The same comment supplies the counterweight without being asked, which is why it is trustworthy: "it was also one of the most touristy towns I've ever seen, but I guess that goes hand in hand. Most restaurants and hotels there are overpriced compared to the rest of Brazil, but that's to be expected."