The Mata Atlantica is Brazil's other great forest, and in some ways its more surprising one. It never spread across a single vast basin the way the Amazon does; instead it ran as a long green ribbon down the eastern edge of the continent, hugging the coast and climbing the mountains for thousands of miles. It once covered a huge share of what is now the most heavily populated part of Brazil, and today only a fraction of that original cover survives. What remains holds a density of life that ranks among the highest anywhere on Earth. Our own 800 acres above Paraty, with 500 of them held as continuous protected forest, sit inside one of the strongest surviving pieces of it.
- Biome
- Mata Atlantica (Atlantic Forest)
- Where
- Serra do Mar / Serra da Bocaina, above Paraty, Rio de Janeiro state
- Protected here
- 500 continuous acres (100 owned + 400 adjoining parkland)
- Status
- one of the world's great and most threatened biodiversity hotspots
What the Atlantic Forest actually is
Start with geography, because the geography explains everything else. The Atlantic Forest is not one uniform kind of woodland. It is a whole family of forest types strung along Brazil's Atlantic seaboard, reaching inland in places and even crossing the modern borders into eastern Paraguay and northeastern Argentina. It runs from the warm northeast of Brazil down through the southeast and into the cooler south. Along that great length it climbs from sea level to the tops of coastal mountains, and every change in altitude, rainfall, and distance from the sea produces a different flavor of forest.
Naturalists usually split it into several broad types. There is the lowland coastal rainforest, dense and humid, that grows on the narrow plain between the sea and the mountains. There is the montane and upper-montane forest that clings to the steep slopes of the coastal ranges, cooler and often wrapped in cloud. Further inland there are semi-deciduous forests, where a real dry season makes many trees drop their leaves for part of the year, and in the far south there are forests dominated by the striking candelabra shape of the Parana pine, the araucaria. Along the shore you also find the restinga, a low scrubby forest on sandy soils, and the mangroves where rivers meet the sea. All of these count as Mata Atlantica. That internal variety is a big part of why the whole system is so rich.
The forest owes its existence to the sea and the mountains working together. Moist air blows in off the warm Atlantic, hits the wall of the Serra do Mar, and is forced upward. As it rises it cools and drops its water. The result is heavy, reliable rainfall on the seaward slopes, and in the higher reaches a near-constant drip of mist that feeds a world of mosses, ferns, and plants that live perched on other plants. Where we are, above Paraty, you feel this directly. The mountains catch the weather, the streams never seem to run dry, and the greenness is relentless.
How much has been lost, and how much remains
Here is the hard part of the story. Of all the biomes in Brazil, the Atlantic Forest has taken the heaviest blow, and it took that blow first. This is the forest the Portuguese met when they arrived. The very name Brazil comes from pau-brasil, the brazilwood tree that was logged out of these coastal forests for the red dye in its heartwood. The cities that became Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Salvador, Recife, and Santos all grew up inside the Atlantic Forest's original range. Sugar, then coffee, then cattle, then cities and highways and ports ate into it for five centuries.
The outcome is stark. Only a small remnant of the original Atlantic Forest cover still stands, and much of what survives is not intact wilderness but scattered fragments, patches marooned in a sea of farmland, pasture, and suburb. Many of those fragments are small, isolated from one another, and missing their largest animals. When people describe the Atlantic Forest as one of the most endangered forest ecosystems on the planet, this is what they mean. It is not that the forest is dull or poor. It is that so little of it is left, and so much of what remains is cut off from the rest.
We will not put a false number on the loss, because the figures vary depending on how you count and what you count as forest. But the direction is not in doubt. This was once a nearly continuous forest running most of the length of a continent's coast, and today you can drive for hours through what used to be forest and see almost none of it. That is exactly why the pieces that do survive, especially the large connected ones in the coastal mountains, matter so much. They are not just pretty. In many cases they are the last real stronghold of species that have nowhere else to go.
Why it is a biodiversity hotspot
The phrase "biodiversity hotspot" has a specific meaning, and the Atlantic Forest is one of the original and most cited examples. A hotspot, in the sense conservationists use it, is a region that combines two things: an exceptional richness of species found nowhere else on Earth, and a serious degree of threat, meaning it has already lost most of its original habitat. The Atlantic Forest checks both boxes emphatically. It is fabulously rich, and it is fabulously reduced. That combination is what makes it a global conservation priority rather than just a beautiful place.
Endemism: species found nowhere else
The key word is endemism. An endemic species is one that occurs naturally in a single place and nowhere else in the world. The Atlantic Forest is famous for how many of its plants and animals are endemic. Large shares of its trees, its amphibians, its primates, and many of its birds live only here. This is not an accident. For long stretches of the planet's history the Atlantic Forest was isolated from the Amazon by drier country in between, and its many mountains, valleys, and altitude bands acted like separate islands where populations could diverge into distinct species. Isolation over deep time is a species factory, and the coastal mountains ran that factory for a very long time.
The practical result is that a forest fragment in the Serra do Mar can hold frogs, orchids, or bromeliads that exist only within a small range of ridges and valleys. Lose that fragment and you do not just lose some forest; you may lose an entire species that never lived anywhere else. This is what raises the stakes on conservation here. In a place with high endemism, protecting habitat is not interchangeable. You cannot make up for clearing one valley by protecting another one down the coast, because the two valleys may not share the same species.
Richness packed into small spaces
The other striking thing is how much life the Atlantic Forest packs into a small area. Some patches of this forest hold among the highest counts of tree species per acre ever recorded anywhere. Walk a short transect and the trunks around you may belong to dozens of different species, many of them uncommon, rather than the same few over and over. Add to those trees the vines, the epiphytes riding on their branches, the insects, the amphibians in the leaf litter, the birds in the canopy, and the richness compounds fast. You do not need to cover much ground here to pass through an enormous number of living things.
In a forest this rich, protecting one valley does not make up for clearing another — the two may not share a single species.
How the Atlantic Forest differs from the Amazon
People often assume Brazil's great forest is the Amazon, and that the Atlantic Forest is a smaller version of the same thing. It is worth clearing that up, because the two are genuinely different, and the differences matter for what you see and for how the forests are protected.
Shape and setting
The Amazon is a vast, low, wet basin drained by one enormous river system, sitting mostly in the interior of the continent. The Atlantic Forest is coastal and mountainous. It is long and narrow rather than broad and deep, and it is defined by the meeting of the sea and a wall of mountains. Because it stretches across a huge range of latitudes and altitudes, it is more varied in climate than the Amazon: parts of it are hot lowland rainforest, parts are cool cloud forest, parts have a real dry season, and parts in the south see genuine cold. The Amazon is more uniform across its expanse; the Atlantic Forest changes character every time you climb a slope or move up the coast.
Different species, high overlap in feel
At a glance the two forests can look similar: tall trees, dense green, dripping humidity, loud with insects and birds. But the actual cast of species is largely different. The Atlantic Forest has its own primates, its own birds, its own frogs and trees, many of them endemic as we have said. Some groups of plants and animals reach their peak of diversity here rather than in the Amazon. A naturalist who knows the Amazon well will still find the Atlantic Forest full of unfamiliar species. They are cousins, not the same forest wearing two names.
Different conservation situation
The starkest difference is how much survives. The Amazon, for all the very real pressure on it, is still largely forested, a mostly continuous block. The Atlantic Forest is the opposite: mostly gone, and what is left is fragmented. That flips the conservation problem. In the Amazon the great task is to keep an intact forest intact. In the Atlantic Forest the task is often to protect and reconnect small surviving pieces, and to guard the few large blocks that remain. The coastal mountains hold most of those large blocks, which is why they matter out of all proportion to their size.
Flagship species of the Atlantic Forest
Every threatened ecosystem has its flagships, the species that put a face on the whole and that people rally around. The Atlantic Forest has some of the most compelling in the world. A few are worth knowing before you spend time here, because knowing what lives in a forest changes how you walk through it.
The golden lion tamarin
If the Atlantic Forest has a mascot, it is the golden lion tamarin, a small primate the color of a struck match, with a lush mane framing its dark face. It lives only in the lowland Atlantic Forest of Rio de Janeiro state and nowhere else on the planet. It came terrifyingly close to disappearing entirely as its habitat was cleared, and its recovery is one of the better-known conservation stories in Brazil, built on captive breeding, reintroduction, and the patient stitching together of forest fragments so that isolated groups could mix again. The golden lion tamarin is the clearest possible lesson in what this forest is up against and what careful work can do. Small, bright, and specific to a small stretch of coast, it stands for the whole idea of endemism.
The muriqui, the woolly spider monkey
The muriqui is the largest primate in the Americas, a big, long-limbed, woolly monkey that swings through the canopy of the Atlantic Forest and exists nowhere else. There are two kinds, a northern and a southern muriqui, and both are among the most threatened primates in the world, their numbers cut down and scattered by the loss of the forest. Muriquis are remarkable animals in temperament as well as size. They are known for being unusually peaceable, living in groups without the aggression and rigid hierarchy that mark many other monkeys. To see one is to see a survivor of a forest that has mostly been erased around it. They need large, connected tracts of forest to persist, which ties their fate directly to the survival of blocks like the ones in the Serra do Mar and Serra da Bocaina.
The jaguar, in context
The jaguar is the great cat of the Americas and it belongs to the Atlantic Forest as much as to the Amazon or the Pantanal. But it is honest to put it in context here. In the fragmented Atlantic Forest the jaguar has lost most of its ground, and it survives mainly in the largest remaining blocks, including protected areas in the coastal mountains. It is present in the broad region as a top predator that needs enormous territory and healthy populations of prey, which makes it a kind of living gauge of how intact a forest really is. We will not claim sightings we cannot promise. What we can say is that the health and connectivity of forests like this one is exactly what gives a wide-ranging predator any chance at all. A forest that can still hold a jaguar somewhere in its larger extent is a forest that is still working.
Toucans and the birds of the canopy
The Atlantic Forest is superb bird country, and toucans are the ambassadors. Their oversized, brightly patterned bills are unmistakable, and the sound of a toucan calling across a valley is one of the classic voices of this forest. Beyond toucans, the coastal forest is rich in tanagers in improbable colors, in hummingbirds, in trogons, in cotingas, in woodpeckers and parrots and the endemic songbirds that a keen birder will travel a long way to find. Many of these birds are important to the forest itself, not just to watch. They carry seeds through the canopy and drop them elsewhere, which is one of the main ways the forest plants itself. A forest full of fruit-eating birds is a forest that keeps regenerating.
Bromeliads, orchids, and the world of epiphytes
Look up in the wet Atlantic Forest and the branches are not bare. They are gardens. Bromeliads, those rosettes of stiff leaves that hold pools of water in their centers, cling to trunks and limbs by the thousands. Orchids of every size do the same, along with ferns, mosses, and cacti that have taken to living in the trees. These are epiphytes: plants that grow on other plants for a foothold in the light without stealing their food. The tanks of water held by bromeliads are tiny worlds in themselves, home to frogs, insects, and other small creatures that live their whole lives many feet above the ground. The sheer density of epiphytes is one of the surest signs that you are in a humid, mist-fed Atlantic Forest rather than a drier woodland.
Palms, trees, and the palmito problem
Palms are central to this forest, and one in particular tells a cautionary story. The juçara palm produces the tender heart of palm, the palmito, prized in Brazilian kitchens. Harvesting it kills the tree, because the heart is the palm's single growing tip. Decades of cutting wild juçara for palmito thinned it drastically across the Atlantic Forest, and that mattered beyond the one species, because the palm's fruit feeds a great many birds and mammals. It is a neat example of how pulling on one thread affects the whole. The forest also holds a huge variety of hardwood trees, figs that strangle their hosts, and the legendary pau-brasil itself, the tree that gave the country its name and was logged nearly to nothing along the coast.
The Serra do Mar as a stronghold
If you want to understand why our particular corner of the Atlantic Forest is worth protecting, you have to understand the Serra do Mar. This is the great coastal mountain range that runs for hundreds of miles along southeastern Brazil, rising steeply behind the shoreline. It is the wall that catches the sea air and wrings the rain out of it, and it is where a very large share of the surviving Atlantic Forest hangs on.
The reason is unglamorous but decisive: these slopes were simply too steep to clear easily. Where the land was flat enough to plow, the forest went early to sugar and coffee and cattle. But the near-vertical faces of the Serra do Mar defeated the ax and the plow, and forest survived on them by default long enough for people to begin protecting it on purpose. The result is that the coastal mountains now hold some of the largest continuous blocks of Atlantic Forest left, linked in places into corridors that let animals move and populations mix. For the big, wide-ranging species, the muriqui, the jaguar, the largest birds, these mountain blocks are the last real strongholds.
The Serra da Bocaina and our neighborhood
Above Paraty the range takes the name Serra da Bocaina, and the mountains here are protected across a broad sweep that reaches from near the coast up toward the high country around Cunha. This is high, rugged, well-watered forest, and it forms one of the more important protected mountain landscapes in the whole biome. Landmarks like the Pedra da Macela, the peak that looks out over the bay and the islands, sit within this world. The old gold road, the Caminho do Ouro, climbs through it, a reminder that even this steep country was crossed and used for centuries, and that forest has grown back over a great deal of human history. Our 800 acres sit in exactly this kind of country: steep, spring-fed, and connected to a much larger fabric of protected mountain forest.
That connection is the whole point. A protected patch that stands alone is worth something, but a protected patch that adjoins other protected forest is worth far more, because animals and plants can move across the boundary. Our land is not an island. The 500 continuous acres we help hold are part of a much larger protected mountain landscape, and that is what gives them real conservation weight rather than merely scenic value.
Threats to the forest
It would be dishonest to describe a forest this beautiful without being clear about what still threatens it. The historical clearing is largely done in the sense that the big losses happened generations ago, but the pressures did not stop. They simply changed shape.
Fragmentation and isolation
The single biggest ongoing problem is fragmentation. When a forest is broken into small, separated pieces, each piece behaves differently from a large intact one. Edges dry out and let in wind, weeds, and heat, so the useful interior of a small fragment is smaller than it looks. Populations trapped in isolated patches cannot exchange members with other populations, so they slowly lose genetic diversity and wink out one by one. The largest animals go first, because they need the most room. A landscape can look green on a map and still be losing species quietly, patch by patch, because the patches are too small and too far apart. This is why reconnecting fragments, building corridors, and protecting the remaining large blocks are the central tasks of Atlantic Forest conservation.
Clearing, fire, and encroachment
Direct clearing still happens at the edges, for pasture, for building, for small-scale agriculture, and for the steady creep of coastal development. Fire, often set to clear land, escapes into forest that is not adapted to burn. Roads open up country that was hard to reach and bring people and pressure with them. None of this is as dramatic as the historical wholesale clearing, but on a forest already cut down to a remnant, even modest losses hurt disproportionately.
Poaching, palm cutting, and wildlife trade
The forest is also drained of individual animals and plants even where the trees still stand. Hunting removes large birds and mammals. The illegal cutting of wild juçara for palmito continues. The trade in wild birds and orchids pulls specific, often endemic, species out of the forest for sale. A forest can be structurally intact and still be quietly emptied of its rarest life. The word for this is defaunation, an ecosystem losing its animals while keeping its trees, and it is a real and underappreciated threat here.
Invasive species and a changing climate
Introduced plants and animals crowd out native ones, especially along disturbed edges. And over the longer term, a shifting climate presses on species that are already boxed into narrow ranges. A frog or plant restricted to a particular band of altitude cannot simply move if the conditions it needs shift up the mountain, because at some point there is no more mountain to move up. Endemism, the very thing that makes this forest precious, also makes it fragile in the face of change.
What you can do while you visit
The most useful things are also the simplest. Stay on the trails so you do not trample seedlings or widen erosion scars. Keep your distance from wildlife and never feed it. Skip wild palm heart on menus, since demand is what drives the cutting. Take your trash back out with you. And when you fall for the place, support the protected areas and the local conservation work that keep it standing. Low-impact visiting, done by enough people, is part of what pays for a forest to survive.
Conservation: how the forest is being defended
The picture is serious but it is not hopeless, and it is worth saying so plainly. The Atlantic Forest has one advantage that some threatened ecosystems lack: it sits under the eyes of most of Brazil's population, in the richest and most connected part of the country. That means loss is visible, and it means there is real capacity, money, and public will behind protecting it.
Protected areas and connection
A network of national parks, state parks, and reserves now guards much of the surviving forest, concentrated where the survival odds are best, in the coastal mountains. The Serra da Bocaina and the wider Serra do Mar system are central to this. Alongside the public parks, private protected forests fill in gaps, buffer the edges of the big blocks, and help bridge the distances between them. The great strategic idea of Atlantic Forest conservation is connection: not just fencing off patches, but linking them so that the whole functions as a working forest again rather than a scatter of green islands.
Restoration and reintroduction
Because so much has been lost, protection alone is not enough; a lot of the work is active repair. Restoration means replanting cleared land with native trees, or simply protecting worn-out pasture and letting the forest come back on its own, which in a wet, seed-rich landscape it will often do with astonishing speed. Reintroduction means returning animals to forests they had vanished from, as with the golden lion tamarin. Corridor projects mean buying or protecting strips of land to reconnect isolated fragments. This is slow, patient, unglamorous work, and it is exactly the kind of work that a small, conservation-minded operation can genuinely contribute to.
The role of small, conservation-first landholders
Big parks are the backbone, but they cannot do everything, and much of the surviving Atlantic Forest is in private hands. That makes what private landowners choose to do enormously important. A landowner who keeps forest standing, who does not clear the steep slopes, who protects the springs and streams, who lets worn land regenerate, is doing conservation whether or not it carries that label. Multiply that by many landholders and you begin to rebuild the connective tissue between the big protected blocks. This is where our model fits.
What the reserve's 500 acres contribute
All of this is why Reserva Sete Quedas exists the way it does, and why we describe ourselves as conservation-first rather than as a resort. The land is 800 acres in the mountains, roughly two miles above the Sete Quedas, the Seven Waterfalls, reached up from Paraty on the Costa Verde. Most of that land is not for building on and never will be.
The protected forest itself
At the heart of the property are 100 acres of privately owned protected Atlantic Forest. Adjoining them is a further 400 acres of protected parkland, held as natural forest outside our ownership boundary. Together those make 500 continuous acres of protected forest. That word continuous is the important one. As we have said, the enemy of the Atlantic Forest is fragmentation, and the value of a protected block rises sharply when it connects to more protected land rather than standing alone. Our 500 acres are not an isolated patch; they are a piece of the larger protected mountain fabric of the Serra da Bocaina, part of the connective tissue that lets this forest keep functioning.
Water, streams, and springs
The property carries three streams and four springs. Those streams feed the seven waterfalls in the valley below, the falls that give the whole area its name. Protecting forest on steep, spring-fed slopes is not only about the trees. Intact forest is what keeps those springs flowing and those streams clean; the roots hold the soil, the canopy softens the rain, and the whole system releases water slowly and steadily rather than in destructive floods. Guarding this forest is, quite literally, guarding the water that makes the waterfalls. You can read more about how we hold this ground on our protected forest page.
The old banana farm and human history
The land is not untouched wilderness, and we do not pretend otherwise. Fifteen of the acres are a working organic banana farm, and that farm is about three hundred years old, laced with ancient roads built by donkey and mule over generations. This matters for how you understand the Atlantic Forest. Very little of this biome is truly pristine; nearly all of it carries the marks of centuries of human use. A three-hundred-year-old farm surrounded by protected forest is a fair picture of the whole region: people and forest have shared this ground for a very long time, and the goal now is not to erase that history but to keep the balance tilted heavily toward the forest. The bananas are grown organically, without the chemicals that would run off into those same streams and springs.
Rewilding and letting the forest return
Part of the work here is simply letting the forest do what it wants to do, which is grow back. In a landscape this wet and this full of seed-carrying birds, land that is protected and left alone reforests quickly. Old edges soften, gaps fill in, and the forest reclaims ground. That patient handing-back of land is its own contribution to the biome, one small counterweight to centuries of clearing. We describe that side of the work on our rewilding the 500 acres page, and the broader philosophy on our conservation page.
A small number of chalets, on purpose
The obvious question is how a private reserve pays to protect five hundred acres of forest. The answer is deliberately modest. Fifty of the acres are set aside as what we call the ecomix park, and the rule there is strict and permanent: exactly one eco-friendly chalet per two acres, which caps the entire property at twenty-five chalets, ever. That is the ceiling, not a starting point. The chalets are low-impact and off-grid-minded, running on solar power, spring water, and composting, built to sit lightly on the land rather than to dominate it. A small number of guests, staying gently, fund the protection of the forest around them. This is the whole logic of the place: it is not mass tourism, not a resort, and not a real-estate development. It is a working piece of conservation that happens to have a few good places to sleep. If that model appeals to you, you can plan a stay or simply get in touch with your questions.
What it is like to be in this forest
Facts and figures give you the shape of the Atlantic Forest, but they do not tell you what it is like to stand in it, and that is worth a few words because it is the thing most people actually come for.
The sound and the light
The first thing you notice is that it is loud, in the best way. The Atlantic Forest is full of voices. Cicadas set up a wall of sound in the heat of the day. Frogs take over at dusk and through the night, each species with its own call, so that a single pond can sound like a small orchestra tuning up. Birds work the layers of the canopy from before dawn. Underneath it all there is the constant sound of water, streams over rock, drips off leaves, the distant weight of the falls. The light comes down in shafts through many layers of leaves, green and shifting, so that even at midday the forest floor is cool and dim. It is a place that engages all your senses at once, and it rewards slowness.
The daily rhythm
The forest keeps its own schedule and it pays to learn it. The early morning is the great time for birds and for the chance of larger animals, before the heat sends everything into the shade. Midday is quieter and hotter, a good time to be near water. Dusk brings a second surge of activity, and then the night belongs to a whole different set of creatures: frogs, insects, and the small mammals that only move after dark. Rain is not an interruption here; it is the main event, and the forest is at its most vivid during and just after a downpour, when everything drips and the streams swell and the frogs go wild. If you time your walking to the forest's rhythm rather than your own, you see far more.
Walking gently
This is steep country, laced with those old donkey-built roads and forest trails, and the walking is part of the experience. It is not about covering distance; it is about stopping often. The best naturalists here move slowly and look closely, because most of the forest's wonders are small: a frog the size of a fingernail, an orchid tucked into a fork of a branch, a column of ants carrying cut leaves, a bromeliad tank holding its own miniature pond. Go slowly, look up as well as down, and let the guide or the silence do its work.
The wider region around the reserve
The forest does not stand apart from the region; it is the region, and part of what makes this stretch of coast extraordinary is how the Atlantic Forest sits right up against the sea, the islands, and a string of old towns. If you are spending time here it helps to see the whole picture.
Paraty and the coast
Down below the reserve is Paraty itself, the UNESCO-listed colonial town on its bay, its cobbled streets and whitewashed houses a legacy of the gold that once came down out of these very mountains along the Caminho do Ouro. The bay is scattered with islands and quiet beaches, and the coastline north and south is a run of forested headlands dropping straight into the water. Places like Trindade, with its wild beaches, and the long fjord-like inlet of the Saco do Mamangua, where forest meets a calm arm of the sea, show the Atlantic Forest in its coastal form, the mangroves and restinga and lowland forest that are as much a part of the biome as the mountain forest above.
Over the mountains to Cunha
Climb the other way, up over the Serra, and you reach Cunha, a cool mountain town on the Sao Paulo side known for its ceramics and its lavender fields. The drive up is a lesson in the forest itself, watching the vegetation change with altitude as you climb through the protected slopes of the Serra da Bocaina. The high country is cooler, often misty, a different face of the same biome. This is upper-montane Atlantic Forest, and it feels a world away from the warm lowland forest by the coast even though they are part of one continuous system.
Islands and the coast beyond
To one side lies Angra dos Reis and its bay of hundreds of islands, chief among them Ilha Grande, itself largely protected forest, with famous beaches like Lopes Mendes. To the other side, into Sao Paulo state, is Ubatuba, a stretch of surf coast where forest again runs down to the sand and where the sea-turtle work of Projeto Tamar has a presence. All of it is the same essential story: the Atlantic Forest and the Atlantic Ocean pressed up against each other, with the Serra do Mar as the spine that holds the forest. To see the mountain forest here is to understand the whole coast a little better. You can find more about the animals you might actually encounter on our wildlife of the reserve page.
Why this forest is worth the trouble
It would be easy to tell the Atlantic Forest's story as a tragedy, and part of it is one. A forest that once ran the length of a continent's coast has been cut down to a remnant, and some of what has been lost will not come back. But that is not the whole of it, and it is not the part we choose to dwell on. What survives is still one of the richest places on Earth, still full of animals and plants that live nowhere else, still capable of growing back with startling vigor when it is simply given room and left alone.
The strongholds are the coastal mountains, the steep, wet, spring-fed slopes of the Serra do Mar and the Serra da Bocaina that were too rugged to clear and are now protected on purpose. Our 500 continuous acres above Paraty are one small piece of that stronghold: owned and adjoining protected forest, held together as one working block, feeding the streams and the seven waterfalls below, edged by a three-hundred-year-old farm, funded by a deliberately small number of chalets. It is not a large contribution measured against a whole biome. But conservation of the Atlantic Forest, at this point in its history, is made almost entirely of contributions like this one, patch added to patch, block guarded next to block, until the pieces begin to work as a forest again.
If you come, come slowly, walk gently, and pay attention. The forest will do the rest. And if you want to understand more of what we are trying to hold here, and how a stay helps hold it, read about our conservation work or plan a visit. The best argument for protecting the Mata Atlantica is simply spending time inside it.