The oldest paths on the reserve were not designed on paper. They were built by feet and hooves — the feet of enslaved and free laborers, the hooves of thousands of pack mules and donkeys — over generations of hard walking up and down these mountains. When you set out on foot here, you are usually walking a road that predates the country of Brazil as it exists today. Some of these trails carried gold down to the sea. Most of them carried the ordinary traffic of a working mountain: salt going up, coffee and cachaca coming down, bananas moving between grove and household. They are still here, still holding the slope together, and they still make the best walking on the property.
- Where
- mountains ~2 miles above Sete Quedas, Paraty
- What
- colonial-era pack-mule roads, now the reserve's walking network
- Age
- trail system tied to the 300-year-old banana farm
- Surface
- stone-set causeway, cut earth bench, and worn bedrock
- Best on foot
- year-round; drier and firmer May to September
What a pack road was, and why it was built to last
To understand these trails you have to picture the problem they solved. The Serra do Mar rises almost straight out of the Atlantic. Between the port of Paraty and the plateau of Cunha and Sao Paulo behind it, there is a wall of forested mountain — steep, wet, and cut by countless streams. For roughly two centuries, everything that moved across that wall moved on the back of an animal. There were no wagons, because there were no roads a wagon could use. There was the mule, the donkey, the horse, and the tropeiro — the muleteer who drove them.
A pack train, or tropa, might be a dozen animals or a hundred, roped nose to tail, each carrying loads slung on a wooden frame. The mule is the animal of choice for this work: stronger on its feet than a horse, more sure than a donkey on bad ground, patient with a heavy load, and honest about what it will and will not do. A mule will refuse a slope that is genuinely dangerous, and generations of trail builders learned to read that refusal. The roads that survive are, in a real sense, roads the mules agreed to.
Because the same animals walked the same lines year after year, and because the loads were valuable, it paid to build the route properly. A washed-out trail meant lost cargo, injured animals, and days added to a journey already measured in weeks. So the good sections were engineered — not with survey instruments, but with accumulated craft. The result is a kind of vernacular civil engineering, worked out by people who never wrote it down and proven by the fact that it is still underfoot three centuries later.
Gold, salt, and the traffic of a mountain
The famous chapter is the gold. In the late 1600s and through the 1700s, gold was pulled out of the interior of Minas Gerais in enormous quantity, and Paraty became one of the ports it flowed through. The Caminho do Ouro — the Gold Trail — ran from the mines down across the Serra da Bocaina and dropped to the sea near Paraty, where the gold was loaded for Rio de Janeiro and then for Portugal. Coming the other way, up the same stones, went salt, tools, cloth, wine, and enslaved people. It was a two-way road, and the return cargo mattered as much as the gold.
You can still walk restored sections of that main trunk route today; the best-known stretch above town is worth a day of anyone's time, and we say more about it on our Caminho do Ouro page. But the Gold Trail was only the spine. Branching off it, and threading between farms, springs, and villages, was a whole nervous system of smaller roads — the everyday paths that let people get to a grove, a mill, a chapel, or a neighbor. The trails on this reserve belong to that second category. They were never the imperial highway. They were the working roads of a working mountain, and that is exactly why they are so intact and so pleasant to walk.
When the gold thinned out, the traffic did not stop. Coffee came to these hills in the 1800s and moved by mule for decades before railroads reshaped the trade and largely bypassed Paraty. Cachaca — sugarcane rum, which Paraty was famous for — moved on these roads too. And underneath all of it, quietly, for the whole span, was the ordinary agriculture of the slopes: manioc, beans, and above all bananas, which have grown on this particular land for something close to three hundred years.
The tropeiros: the people of the pack roads
The roads were built by labor, but they were kept alive by a particular kind of person: the tropeiro, the muleteer. These were the men who owned or drove the pack trains, who knew every ford and every bad section between the coast and the plateau, and who spent much of their lives on the move. A journey across the Serra was measured in weeks, not hours. It meant sleeping rough, cooking simple food over a fire, tending animals that were both livelihood and responsibility, and reading weather and trail with a skill that took years to build.
Their culture left marks that outlasted the trade. Along the great routes there were wayside stops — places to rest the animals, buy feed, and shelter for the night — that grew into hamlets and, in some cases, into towns. The food of the road survives in Brazilian cooking to this day; feijao tropeiro, the muleteer's beans, is still eaten across this part of the country and is exactly what its name says it is: the sturdy, portable food of people who lived on the trail. When you walk a quiet stretch of old road here and try to imagine the traffic it once carried, it is the tropeiro you should picture — patient, weathered, unhurried, moving with his animals at the mule's own pace.
It is also worth remembering, plainly, that much of the hardest work on these roads was done by enslaved people, both in the building and in the labor of the farms and mines the roads served. The trails are beautiful, and they are also a record of that history. We think both things are true at once, and that walking them thoughtfully means holding both.
The animals: mule, donkey, and horse
These are usually called donkey roads, and donkeys certainly walked them, but the workhorse of the pack trade — if the phrase can be forgiven — was the mule. It helps to know the difference, because the animal explains the road.
A donkey is tough, sure-footed, and economical, excellent on rough ground and content on poor feed, but limited in how much it can carry. A horse can carry and pull more and moves faster, but it is comparatively delicate on wet, steep, broken terrain and needs better feed and care. The mule — the cross between a donkey and a horse — combines much of the best of both: close to the horse in strength and size, close to the donkey in surefootedness, stamina, and toughness. For moving heavy, valuable loads across a wet mountain, week after week, nothing beat it.
The mule's temperament shaped the engineering as much as its body did. A mule will simply stop rather than take a step it judges unsafe, and it will not be bullied past that judgment for long. Trail builders who ignored that lost animals and cargo; builders who respected it produced roads that were safe by design. So when you walk a gentle, well-drained, sensibly turned old road here, you are, in part, walking the accumulated good judgment of a great many careful animals.
The banana farm and its roads
The 15-acre organic banana farm at the heart of the reserve is not a museum piece. It is a working grove, and it is about three centuries old, which means its roads are among the oldest continuously used paths on the property. Bananas are heavy, awkward, and bruise easily. A stem of fruit is an ungainly load. For most of the farm's history, that load moved exactly one way: on an animal, down a graded path, one bunch balanced against another.
That practical fact shaped the land you walk today. The farm roads are cut and set to a grade a loaded donkey could manage without stumbling and without the fruit swinging into the bank. They connect the grove to water, to the old house sites, and to the trails that lead down toward the seven waterfalls and up toward the ridge. Walk them slowly and you can read the logic: the road always finds the gentlest honest line across the slope, never the shortest steep one. That is the mule's preference made permanent in the ground.
We keep the grove organic and keep the old roads in use because both are part of the same inheritance. If you want the fuller story of how this land has been farmed and lived on, our history of the Sete Quedas valley goes further into it, and the land itself is described in its own right on the property page.
The engineering of a good mule road
A well-built pack road is a quiet piece of engineering. Nobody notices it when it works; you only notice the bad ones, when your boots are sliding and the trail has become a gully. Here is what the old builders got right, and what you can still see if you know to look.
Grade: the road climbs slowly on purpose
The single most important decision in a mountain trail is how steeply it climbs. A loaded mule can keep going almost indefinitely on a gentle, steady grade, but it tires fast and slips on anything too steep. So the roads here rarely go straight up. They climb at a shallow, patient angle, holding roughly the same rate of rise for long stretches, contouring across the face of the slope rather than attacking it head-on. This is why an old road can feel almost gentle even while it is taking you a long way up. The grade was set by the animal's stride and lungs, and it happens to be very close to what a human walker finds comfortable too.
Drainage: water is the real enemy
In this climate, the thing that destroys a trail is not use. It is water. A tropical downpour on a bare, sloping path will carve a channel down the middle of it in a single storm, and once water owns the trail, the trail is finished. The old builders understood this completely. They gave their roads a slight outward tilt so water would run off the downhill edge instead of pooling and cutting. They laid stone across the tread at intervals to break the flow and send it sideways. Where a spring or a small stream crossed the line, they paved the crossing with stone so the water passed over hard ground and never got a grip. A great deal of the stonework you see on these trails is not there to make walking pleasant. It is there to manage water, and it has been doing that job for a very long time.
Switchbacks: turning the climb
When the mountain is simply too steep to cross on a gentle grade, the road turns back on itself — a switchback. Each leg climbs at the manageable angle, and the turn gains height without ever forcing the animal onto a dangerous pitch. Building a good switchback is harder than it looks: the turn itself has to be wide enough and firm enough for a loaded, roped animal to swing around without losing its footing or its load. On the steeper flanks of the reserve you can still trace these turns stacked up the mountainside, each one a small decision by someone who knew that a straight line would have cost them animals.
Stone paving: the calçada
The most striking sections are the paved ones — the calçada, a road surfaced with fitted stone. On the great Gold Trail routes these could be substantial engineered causeways, and even the humbler farm and connector roads were often paved through their wettest, steepest, or most fragile stretches. The stones were set by hand, chosen and fitted so the surface would hold together and shed water, with larger stones edging the road to keep it from spreading and collapsing downhill. Where you find the pavement worn smooth and slightly hollowed down its center, you are looking at the polish of countless hooves and feet passing over the same stones for generations. That hollow is a kind of clock.
The grade was set by the animal's stride and lungs — and it happens to be very close to what a human walker finds comfortable too.
Reading an old road
Once you know what to look for, you can tell an old pack road from a modern trail almost at a glance, and reading it becomes part of the pleasure of the walk. A few things give it away.
The line it takes
A modern trail, cut for walkers or for machines, often goes where the map or the view suggests. An old pack road goes where the animals could go. It clings to a steady grade, contours patiently across slopes, and refuses steep pitches even when a steep pitch would be shorter. If a trail seems to take a long, gentle, almost lazy line up a mountain, holding its climb at an even rate for a great distance, you are probably on an old road.
The width and the edges
These roads were built for a loaded, roped animal, sometimes for animals passing in both directions, so the good sections have a real, consistent width — wider than a footpath, cut as a bench into the slope. Look for the edges: a slightly raised lip of larger stones on the downhill side, or a cut bank on the uphill side, both there to hold the road in place against gravity and water.
The stonework and the wear
Hand-set paving, cross-stones laid to shed water, paved fords at stream crossings, and above all the smooth, faintly hollowed polish down the center of the oldest pavement — these are the fingerprints of the pack trade. A modern path does not wear that way, because a modern path has not carried three centuries of hooves along exactly the same line.
How these roads became the reserve's walking network
When we talk about the reserve's trails, we are mostly talking about these roads. We did not lay out a new trail system with a bulldozer and a map. The network was already here, drawn into the mountain over three centuries, and our work has been to find it, clear it carefully, keep the water off it, and let people walk it. That is a very different thing from building a park path, and it is the reason the walking here feels the way it does — you are moving through the landscape along lines the landscape itself agreed to long ago.
The practical upshot is a connected web of routes at different lengths and difficulties. Some are short and nearly level — the old farm roads around the grove, easy enough for almost anyone, good for a slow morning or a walk with children. Some climb toward the ridge on the patient mule grade, an hour or two of steady, rewarding effort. Some drop toward the streams and the waterfalls below. Because they were built for loaded animals, even the climbing routes are rarely brutal; the grade that suited a mule suits a family, a solo walker, or a pair of friends who would rather talk than gasp. We describe specific routes and how they connect on our forest hikes page.
Keeping these roads open is ongoing work. The forest here grows fast and constantly tries to reclaim the tread; a road left alone for a few wet seasons disappears under leaf litter, roots, and new growth. So the network is maintained the way it was always maintained — by regular, low-impact hand work, clearing the drainage, resetting the occasional displaced stone, cutting back the encroaching green. We do it deliberately and lightly. The goal is never to modernize these paths into something smooth and generic, but to keep them being what they already are.
Walking the old roads well
Wear shoes with real grip — set stone gets slick when wet, and the smoothest, most historic pavement is the most slippery. Walk the paved and stepped sections slowly, especially downhill. Start earlier than you think; the light in the forest goes long before the sky does. Carry water even on the short farm loops, and let someone at the chalets know your route before a longer climb.
What you actually see when you walk them
The history is in the ground, but the pleasure is in the details. Here is some of what the old roads put in front of you, if you go slowly enough to notice.
The stonework, and the wear on it
Look down. On the paved stretches you will see hand-set stone, sometimes edged with larger blocks, sometimes worn into a smooth central runnel by three hundred years of traffic. You will see the low stone check-dams and cross-stones that throw water off the trail. At stream crossings you will find paved fords, still doing their job. None of this was made by machine. Every stone was placed by a person, and the collective labor represented in a single good kilometer of old road is genuinely humbling to think about.
The forest closing over the road
These roads run through the Mata Atlantica — the Atlantic Forest of the Serra do Mar and Serra da Bocaina, one of the richest and most threatened forests on Earth. Walking the old grade, you move under a high canopy of forest trees hung with bromeliads and orchids, past tree ferns and palms, through pockets where the humidity and birdsong close in around you. The road is a corridor through all of it, and because it climbs steadily, it slowly changes the forest around you as you gain height. The trees, the light, and the sound all shift as you go up.
Water, everywhere
The reserve holds three streams and four springs, and the streams are what feed the seven waterfalls in the valley below. The old roads were laid out in constant negotiation with that water, so you are never far from it. You cross paved fords, you hear it before you see it, you pass springs seeping clear and cold out of the mountainside. On a hot day the sound of running water is a companion for most of the walk.
Birds, and the animals of the forest
Move quietly on the old roads early or late and the forest comes forward. This stretch of the Mata Atlantica is famous among naturalists for its birds — toucans crossing the canopy, tanagers in bright color, the calls of species found nowhere else. Butterflies work the sunlit gaps where the road opens. In the quiet, you may hear or glimpse larger residents of the forest going about their business. The roads are old enough and quiet enough that the wildlife treats them as part of the landscape, which is to say, walk gently and the forest will show you more.
Traces of the people who built and used them
The roads did not exist in isolation. They connected a lived-in landscape — house sites, old planting terraces, water sources, the grove. Along the way you come across the quiet evidence of that life: the shape of an old clearing, a stretch of drystone wall, the way a road bends to reach a spring or a former dwelling. None of it is grand. All of it is real, and it is a more honest record of how people actually lived up here than any monument would be.
Preservation: why we keep them, and how
It would be easier, in the short run, to let most of these roads go, or to bulldoze a couple of them into something wider and faster. We do neither, for reasons that are both cultural and practical.
Culturally, these roads are the physical memory of the region. The Caminho do Ouro and its whole family of pack trails are among the most important surviving remnants of colonial Brazil, and the Paraty area protects and celebrates them for good reason. The humble farm and connector roads on this reserve are part of that same heritage. They record, in stone and worn earth, the labor of the people — many of them enslaved — who built and worked this landscape. To erase them would be to erase that record. We would rather keep it legible.
Practically, the old engineering still works better than most new alternatives. A three-hundred-year-old road that drains properly and sits at a mule's easy grade is a far better piece of infrastructure for a low-impact reserve than a fresh-cut track that erodes in the first heavy season. The old builders solved the problem of moving through these mountains gently, and their solution is exactly the one a conservation-first property wants: minimal earth moved, water respected, the forest left as intact as possible on either side.
So our preservation work is conservative in the true sense of the word. We clear and maintain the drainage that keeps water off the tread. We reset displaced stones by hand rather than repaving. We keep the corridor open without widening it. We do not pave what was never paved, and we do not smooth away the character of what was. When a section needs real repair, the goal is to make it disappear into the existing road, not to stand out as new.
The bigger picture: roads, forest, and funding
It is worth being clear about how the pieces of this place fit together, because the roads are not a standalone attraction. They run through a landscape that is being actively protected, and the protection is what makes the walking possible.
The reserve is 800 acres in the mountains above Paraty. Within it are 100 acres of privately owned protected forest, and adjoining that is a further 400 acres of protected parkland — Atlantic Forest that sits outside our ownership boundary but forms one continuous block of protection with our land. Together that is 500 acres of unbroken protected forest, laced with these old roads and held against the pressures that have already destroyed so much of the Mata Atlantica elsewhere.
A separate 50 acres is the ecomix park, where we allow exactly one low-impact chalet per two acres — a hard ceiling of 25 chalets, ever. The chalets are designed to tread lightly: solar power, spring water, composting, off-grid in spirit. The logic is simple and deliberate. A small number of guests, staying gently, fund the protection of the whole forest and the upkeep of these historic roads. This is not a resort and it is not a development. It is a conservation project that pays for itself by letting a few people share it. When you walk the old donkey roads, your stay is part of what keeps them cleared, drained, and standing.
Walking the roads in context: the wider region
The reserve's trails connect, in spirit and sometimes in fact, to one of the great walking regions of Brazil. It helps to know what surrounds you.
Paraty and the coast
Below the mountains is Paraty itself — a UNESCO-listed colonial town of whitewashed walls and irregular stone streets, set on a bay of clear water and small islands. The town exists because of the roads; it was the port where the pack trails met the sea. Its historic center still floods on the highest tides, the old streets built to let the water in and out. Spend an evening there and the connection between the town and the mountain roads above it becomes obvious. From the bay you can reach the beaches and coves of the Costa Verde, and the famous Saco do Mamangua, a long fjord-like inlet backed by the same steep forest.
Cunha, over the Serra
Follow the line of the old roads up and over the Serra and you reach Cunha, the mountain town on the plateau, known now for its ceramic studios and lavender fields and its cooler, clearer air. The modern road between Paraty and Cunha traces, more or less, the ancient logic of the pack routes: this was always the way across. Standing at the top of the pass, with the coast on one side and the plateau on the other, you understand why the mules came this way and why the roads mattered so much.
Ilha Grande, Ubatuba, and the islands
To one side lies Angra dos Reis and Ilha Grande, a scatter of 365 islands and, on the big island, some of the finest beaches in Brazil — Lopes Mendes chief among them — reached themselves only on foot along forest trails, a saltwater cousin to the mountain roads above Paraty. To the other side, across the state line into Sao Paulo, is Ubatuba, a long coast of surf beaches and the sea-turtle work of Projeto Tamar. The reserve sits in the middle of all of it, high in the forest that connects the coast to the plateau.
Planning your walk
The old roads are open to everyone who stays with us, and they suit a wide range of walkers. Families do the gentle farm loops around the grove. Couples take a slow morning down toward the water. Solo walkers and groups take the longer climbs toward the ridge. There is no gatekeeping here and no need for special fitness on the easier routes; the mule grade is forgiving by design.
When to come
The roads walk well year-round, but the ground is firmest and the going driest roughly from May to September, the cooler and less rainy months. The warmer months from October to March are greener, louder with birds and insects, and more prone to afternoon downpours — which are worth planning around, since wet stone is slick and streams rise fast. Whenever you come, mornings are the best time on the trails: cooler, quieter, and richer in wildlife.
What to bring
- Real footwear. Shoes or boots with genuine grip. Set stone and worn pavement are slippery when wet, and the most historic sections are the smoothest.
- Water. Even on the short loops. The climate is humid and you will lose more than you expect.
- Sun and rain cover. A hat and light layers for the open sections, and something waterproof in the wetter months, when a clear morning can turn to rain by mid-afternoon.
- Time, and patience. These roads reward slowness. The wildlife comes forward when you stop moving, and the stonework only tells its story to someone willing to look down and read it.
How to get onto the roads
From the chalets, the network is right outside the door — the old farm roads begin at the grove and connect from there to the longer routes. We are glad to point you toward a walk that fits your morning, your legs, and the weather, and to steer you clear of anything too ambitious in the wet. If you want to build a few days of walking into a stay, or simply want to know more before you come, plan a stay with us or get in touch and we will help you sort out the details.
The roads have been here a long time, and if they are looked after, they will be here a long time yet. Walking them is the simplest thing in the world — you just put one foot in front of the other, the way the mules did, on a grade someone set for them three centuries ago. But it is also, quietly, a way of keeping faith with everyone who built and used and maintained these paths before us. The reserve exists to protect this forest. The old roads are how you meet it.