Weddings & Retreats

Reserva Sete Quedas is a conservation project first and a place to gather second, and that order shapes every event we host. We are an 800-acre private reserve in the mountains above Paraty, with a hard limit of twenty-five eco-chalets and a great deal of protected Atlantic Forest around them, which means we are built for the small, the quiet, and the genuinely private rather than the large and loud. Small weddings, wellness and yoga retreats, family reunions, and whole-reserve buyouts all belong here, as long as they are willing to keep the forest first. If that is the kind of gathering you have in mind, this page explains how it works, what we can and cannot do, and how to start the conversation.

Scale

intimate gatherings only

Chalets

25 maximum, ever

Whole-reserve buyout

all 25 chalets, by season

Ceremony settings

waterfalls, canopy decks, forest clearings, old stone roads

Catering

the farm plus Paraty producers

Enquire

via the contact page

How gatherings work inside a conservation reserve

The first thing worth saying is what this place is not. It is not an event venue with a forest theme, and it is not a resort that happens to take weddings on the side. It is a working reserve — a protected forest, three streams and four springs, a three-hundred-year-old organic banana farm, and twenty-five low-impact chalets spread across fifty acres — that can host a small gathering without harming any of it. That distinction is not a marketing pose. It sets real limits on what we will and will not do, and those limits are exactly what make an event here feel the way it does.

Because the land comes first, everything about a gathering here is shaped by scale. There are only twenty-five chalets, and there will only ever be twenty-five, one per two acres of the ecomix park. That number sets a natural ceiling on how many people can sleep on the property, and we would rather work within it honestly than cram in more and pretend the forest does not notice. A gathering here is measured in a handful of chalets, or in the whole set for a buyout, not in ballroom covers. If your plans need hundreds of guests, a marquee city, and a fleet of coaches, we are genuinely the wrong place, and we will tell you so kindly and early rather than waste your time.

What we offer instead is something a large venue cannot: a whole living landscape, briefly and carefully given over to your group. The trade is that you meet the forest on its terms. Music carries a long way in a quiet valley, so it stays gentle and it stops at a sensible hour. Light travels far in real darkness, so we keep it low and warm rather than throwing beams up into the canopy. Vehicles are kept to a minimum on the mountain roads. Everything that comes up the mountain for an event comes back down again. None of this is a hardship once you are here. It is simply the etiquette of being a guest in one of the world's great and most threatened forests, and most people find that the constraints are the very thing that makes the day unlike any other they have attended.

It also helps to understand where you are, geographically, because it explains the mood. The reserve sits in the Serra do Mar, on the shoulder of the Serra da Bocaina, roughly two miles above the Sete Quedas — the Seven Waterfalls — that give the place its name. Below you is Paraty, the UNESCO colonial town on the Costa Verde of Rio de Janeiro state, with its cobbled streets and its bay of islands. Over the mountains behind you is Cunha, a highland town known for wood-fired ceramics and lavender fields. This is not a remote wilderness with nothing around it; it is a quiet, high, forested pocket within reach of a great deal, which is part of why it suits a gathering. Guests can come up the mountain to marry or to practice or to simply be together, and still slip down to the coast or over to the highlands on the days around the main event.

The kinds of gatherings that suit this place

The common thread is intimacy. If your gathering is small enough to feel personal, low-key enough to respect the quiet, and drawn here by the forest rather than in spite of it, it will suit Reserva Sete Quedas. Within that, a few kinds of event come up again and again, and each has its own rhythm.

Small weddings and elopements

Couples come to us for the opposite of a production. A wedding here is a small number of the people you actually want present, a ceremony somewhere genuinely wild, a good meal grown a short walk away, and a few unhurried days of forest around it rather than a single frantic afternoon. Elopements — just the two of you, or the two of you and a witness or two — are among the most moving days we host, because the setting does the work that a hundred guests and a marquee usually strain to do, and does it more honestly.

Wellness and yoga retreats

Retreat leaders find that the reserve amplifies whatever they bring. The forest is already quiet, already dark at night, already loud with birdsong at dawn; a retreat simply gives people permission to notice it. Yoga on a canopy deck, meditation beside a stream, forest walks between sessions, and long slow meals suit the place perfectly. If you run retreats, our wellness and forest bathing page describes the setting in more detail and will tell you quickly whether it fits your programme.

Family reunions and milestones

Several chalets taken together make a fine base for a family that wants time in one place, in real nature, without anyone having to share a wall. Big birthdays, anniversaries, a quiet vow renewal, a scattering of ashes, a graduation, a reunion of people who are usually scattered across continents — the reserve handles these gently, because it was built for privacy and for the kind of slow days that milestones deserve. Families with children of different ages tend to do especially well here, because the forest occupies everyone without a screen or a schedule.

Small creative and working gatherings

We also host small off-sites, writing weeks, board retreats, and creative sessions for groups who understand that the point of coming this far is to disconnect a little. There is solar power and there is a signal that comes and goes; what there is in abundance is space to think. Groups that lean into that get far more out of a few days here than they would from a conventional meeting room. Groups that need constant connectivity and a large screen in every corner will be frustrated, and again, we will say so plainly before you commit rather than after.

Small weddings in the forest

A wedding at Reserva Sete Quedas is a small wedding by design, and that is its strength. Because the property tops out at twenty-five chalets, the number of guests who can stay overnight is naturally limited, and a wedding built around that reality tends to be one where every person present genuinely matters to the couple. We think that is how a wedding should feel anyway. The reserve just makes it unavoidable, and takes the pressure of the guest-list arithmetic off your shoulders in the kindest way.

We are deliberately not going to promise you a slick, one-size-fits-all wedding package on this page, because the honest truth is that the right shape for your day depends on who you are, how many are coming, the season, and which parts of the reserve suit your plans. What we can promise is a genuinely wild setting, a small and attentive team who will be straight with you at every step, and a willingness to help you build a day that fits the forest rather than fights it. The details are a conversation, and we would rather have that conversation properly than sell you a template.

Ceremony settings, described honestly

The reserve gives you several kinds of place to stand and say your vows, and we describe them in general terms here because the specifics — footing, distance, weather, the season's water levels — are things we would rather walk through with you for your actual date than overpromise in writing. A setting that is perfect for one couple in one season is a stretch for another, and we would rather match the place to you than the other way around.

There is water. The property carries three streams and four springs, and those waters gather below the reserve into the seven waterfalls that give the Sete Quedas its name. The falls themselves sit downhill, roughly two miles below the chalets, over steep and natural ground, so a ceremony at the base of a waterfall is a walk and a descent rather than a step off a deck — beautiful, and worth it for the right couple, but not casual, and not right for every guest's mobility. Closer to hand, the streams offer quieter water: clear, cold, running over stone in pockets of deep shade, the kind of place where a small group can gather at the edge of moving water without a hard trek to reach it.

There is canopy. Several of the chalets and gathering spots open onto decks set among the trees, where a ceremony happens with the layered forest as its backdrop and the light coming down soft and broken through the leaves. A canopy deck suits couples who want the forest close and the footing easy, and it comes into its own at the edges of the day, when the light is long and low and gold across the ridges. It is also the most weather-resilient of the outdoor settings, which matters more here than most couples expect.

And there is the forest floor itself — small clearings and the ancient donkey and mule roads that lace the property, stone paths cut and stepped by hand over three centuries to move harvests up and down a slope too steep for wheels. Standing to marry on a path that people and animals have walked for that long is a particular kind of feeling, and it costs the land nothing, because the way is already there. For a couple drawn to history as much as to nature, the old roads are quietly the most meaningful ground on the property.

What we will and will not build

We will help you gather people at a beautiful spot, work out the practical path to it, arrange seating that leaves no trace, and time the day around the light and the weather. We will point you to the settings that suit your group's mobility and your season honestly, and tell you plainly which are a stretch. We will help you think through the flow of a day up here, from the ceremony to the meal to the slow evening that follows, so that nothing feels rushed and nothing fights the place.

What we will not do is bulldoze a clearing, truck in a heavy stage, run generators late into a quiet valley, or reshape the land for a single afternoon. Anything we build for a wedding is light, temporary, and gone without a mark the next week. The flowers, where there are flowers, lean toward what grows in the region rather than refrigerated blooms flown across the world. The lighting stays warm and low so the night sky stays visible and the wildlife stays undisturbed. If that philosophy is the wedding you want, we are a very good fit. If it is not, we would rather you find that out now, from us, than discover it on the day.

The legal side of marrying in Brazil

One honest, practical note that saves couples a lot of confusion: a legally binding marriage in Brazil is a civil process handled through a registry office, with paperwork and residency and translation requirements that are real and take time, particularly for foreign nationals. Many couples who marry here treat the day at the reserve as their celebration and their vows — the part that matters to them — and handle the formal civil registration separately, either at home before they travel or through the proper channels in Brazil with plenty of lead time. We are naturalists and hosts, not lawyers, so we will not advise you on the legal specifics; we will simply encourage you to sort the paperwork question early with the right professional, so that the day up here can be purely about the forest and the people in it.

Wellness and yoga retreats

Of all the gatherings we host, wellness and yoga retreats may be the most natural fit for what the reserve already is. The whole property is, in a sense, one long argument for slowing down and paying attention, which is exactly what a good retreat asks of people. Leaders who bring a group here are not fighting the environment to create a mood; the mood is already there in the dawn chorus, the cold spring water, the dark nights, and the sheer quiet of a forest with no road noise in it.

The rhythm of a retreat day

A retreat here tends to organize itself around the light. Mornings are the reserve at its best: the forest is loudest and most alive in the hour after dawn, the air is cool, and the light is clean. That is the natural time for movement and practice. The middle of the day suits stillness, rest, a long meal, or a slow walk under the canopy on a lower trail when the sun is high. The late afternoon opens up again as the heat eases and the birds return, and the evening belongs to real darkness, to the stars, and to the kind of sleep that a quiet forest gives you and a city never does.

Because the property is small and private, a retreat can own its rhythm completely. There is no clash with other guests' schedules if you take enough of the reserve, no music from a neighboring party, no jet-ski soundtrack from a nearby bay. Groups find that people drop into the pace faster than they expect, often by the second morning, once the forest has done its quiet work on them.

Spaces for practice

The canopy decks are the obvious homes for yoga, breathwork, and meditation — level, sheltered enough to be reliable, and open to the forest on every side. For work that wants moving water nearby, the quieter reaches of the streams give you the sound of cold water over stone without a difficult approach. For forest bathing in the proper sense — slow, sensory, unhurried time under the trees — the ancient roads and the lower trails are ideal, because the ground is already made and the forest around it is old and continuous. Our wellness and forest bathing page goes deeper into that practice and the science behind why time in an intact forest measurably changes people.

What we do not have, and will not pretend to have, is a purpose-built studio with sprung floors and a wall of mirrors. This is a forest reserve, and the spaces are the spaces the land offers. Most retreat leaders find that a genuine advantage — practicing among living trees, on a deck open to the birdsong, changes the quality of a session in a way no indoor room reproduces. If your programme depends on heated rooms, specialist flooring, or a large indoor hall regardless of weather, we are probably not the right base, and we will say so before you plan around us.

Whole-reserve buyouts: taking all twenty-five chalets

For the most private gatherings — a wedding where you want the whole world to fall away, a family that wants the mountain to itself, a retreat that needs total control of its environment, a milestone that deserves nothing less — the reserve can be taken in full. A whole-reserve buyout means all twenty-five chalets and the shared spaces of the ecomix park are given over to a single group for a set stretch of time. For those days, the reserve is effectively yours, within the same low-impact rules that govern everything we do.

What a buyout actually gives you

The heart of a buyout is exclusivity and quiet. With every chalet in your group's hands, there are no other guests on the property, no strangers on the trails, no one else at the streams or on the decks. A group of the right size can spread out across the fifty acres of the ecomix park and still gather easily, because the chalets, while private, sit within one continuous property laced by the old roads. You get the run of the shared gathering spaces, the settings for a ceremony or a group practice, and the whole slow landscape without having to share it with anyone outside your own party.

Just as importantly, a buyout gives you control over the rhythm of the days. You set the mealtimes, the quiet hours, the shape of the schedule, within the sensible limits the forest requires. For a wedding, that means the day can breathe. For a retreat, it means the environment can be shaped entirely around the practice. For a family, it means no negotiating with anyone else's holiday.

How numbers and seasons work

Twenty-five chalets sets the ceiling on how many people can sleep on the property, so a buyout is still, by the nature of the place, an intimate gathering — a group counted in dozens, not hundreds. The exact number of guests depends on how the chalets are configured for your dates and how your party is made up, which is one of the first things we will work out together. To learn how the chalets themselves are built and what they hold, the eco-chalets page is the place to start, and the amenities page covers what is and is not provided across the property.

Season matters more here than it does in most places, and it shapes a buyout in two ways. First, the forest is a different experience in the greener, wetter months than in the clearer, drier ones — the waterfalls are stronger after rain, the trails are softer, the light is different. Second, availability and the practical shape of a full buyout naturally depend on the calendar, since taking all twenty-five chalets for a stretch is a significant commitment of the whole property. The earlier you start the conversation, the more room there is to match your dates to the season you actually want. Our stays and booking page gives a sense of how time on the reserve is arranged, and a buyout is best thought of as an extension of that, planned well ahead.

Eating from the farm

The oldest human thing on the reserve is the farm: fifteen acres of working organic banana plantation, cultivated on the same ground for roughly three hundred years, laced with the hand-built donkey and mule roads that carried harvests up and down a slope too steep for anything on wheels. For an event, that farm is not decoration. It is the reason the food here can taste of the place it is served in, without a long supply chain behind every plate.

Catering for a gathering leans on what the land and the region actually produce. Fruit and produce from the farm, in season, cooked simply, is the plainest luxury the reserve offers and needs no dressing up. Bananas in more forms than most visitors imagine, of course, but also whatever else the terraces and the kitchen gardens are giving at the time of year you come. Beyond the property, Paraty and its surroundings have real food to offer — the Costa Verde gives seafood, the highlands around Cunha give cheeses and preserves and cachaça from small producers, and the region takes its cachaça and its coffee seriously. We work with what is genuinely near and genuinely good rather than importing a generic banquet.

Two honest points about catering here. First, this is a mountain reserve, not a hotel with a brigade of chefs on standby, so the food side of an event is planned deliberately and in advance rather than summoned on a whim. Menus are built around what will actually be in season and what can be brought up the mountain sensibly. Second, the low-impact rules apply to the table as much as to everything else: we avoid the mountain of single-use waste that a conventional catered event generates, we compost what the kitchen produces, and we send nothing needless up the mountain only to haul it back down. Good food that respects the forest is the whole aim, and it turns out the two go together more easily than people expect.

The kitchen gardens and the season

Alongside the bananas, the reserve keeps kitchen gardens, and what they give changes through the year with the rhythm of a subtropical mountain climate. Part of the pleasure of eating here is that the table is honest about the season — you eat what the land is offering now, not a fixed menu pretending it is July in every month. For a wedding or a retreat, that means the food becomes part of the sense of place rather than a neutral backdrop, and it gives us something concrete to plan around with you once we know your dates.

The low-impact rules, in plain terms

We have mentioned the rules throughout, but it is worth gathering them in one place, because they are not fine print — they are the whole point, and understanding them early is the difference between a gathering that fits and one that fights. None of them are onerous. Most guests barely notice them by the second day. But we would rather you know them going in.

• Keep it small. The property tops out at twenty-five chalets, so numbers are limited by design. We plan every gathering around the real ceiling rather than pretending it is not there.
• Keep it quiet. Sound carries in a still valley and reaches wildlife you cannot see. Amplified music, where there is any, stays gentle and ends at a sensible hour so the forest can be a forest again at night.
• Keep it dark. Real darkness is one of the rarest things the reserve offers. Lighting stays low and warm, which protects the night sky, the sleep of every guest, and the nocturnal life all around you.
• Leave no trace. Everything that comes up the mountain for an event goes back down. Anything we set up for a ceremony or a meal is light, temporary, and gone without a mark. We compost, we minimize waste, and we do not reshape the land for a single day.
• Move gently. Vehicles on the mountain roads are kept to a minimum, and much of moving around the property happens on foot, along the old roads and the trails that already exist.
• Respect the water. The streams and springs here feed the waterfalls below and the people downstream. Nothing goes into the water, and swimming happens in the pools you are shown, read against the day's conditions.

Read as a list, that can sound like a lot of no. In practice it reads as one long yes to the thing you actually came for. The quiet, the darkness, the clean water, the intact forest — these exist precisely because the rules protect them. A gathering that honors them gets the reserve at its best. A gathering that resents them would have been happier somewhere else, and we would rather help you see that before you book than after.

The constraints are not the price of the place. They are the place.

The setting through the year

People often ask when is best, and the honest answer is that there is no single best, only trade-offs, and the right season depends on what you want the day to feel like. The reserve sits high in the Serra do Mar, so it is cooler and wetter than the coast below, and the mountain makes its own weather regardless of the forecast in Paraty.

The warmer, greener months, roughly the southern summer, bring the forest to its fullest: heavy foliage, powerful waterfalls, loud dawns, and afternoon rain that can arrive fast and leave just as fast. It is lush and alive, and it is also the season most likely to hand you a dramatic sky at an inconvenient moment, which is why the weather plan matters. The cooler, drier months bring clearer skies, gentler water, firmer trails, and cold nights that are wonderful for stargazing and for sleeping. Neither is wrong. A couple who wants the forest at its most exuberant and does not mind planning around rain will love the green season; a couple who wants reliable clear light and comfortable walking will lean to the drier months.

Because this genuinely shapes a wedding or a retreat, it is one of the first things we talk through when you enquire, alongside your dates and your numbers. We would rather steer you toward the season that fits your vision than let you book blind and hope. The forest is honest about the weather; we try to be too.

The wider region, for guests who travel far

Many of the people who gather here have come a long way, and the reserve's position means a wedding or a retreat can be the center of a longer trip rather than an isolated day. Guests often arrive early or stay on afterward, and there is a great deal within reach worth building a few days around.

Below you is Paraty, one of the best-preserved colonial towns in Brazil, a UNESCO World Heritage site of whitewashed houses and cobbled streets that flood at the highest tides. Its bay is scattered with islands and quiet beaches reached by boat, and the old gold route, the Caminho do Ouro, climbs into the mountains from near the town — the same kind of hand-built stone road that laces the reserve itself. South along the coast is Trindade, with its natural tidal pool and easygoing surf-village feel, and the long fjord-like inlet of Saco do Mamanguá, often called Brazil's only tropical fjord, which rewards a slow day by boat or on foot.

Offshore and a little further up the coast lies Ilha Grande, a large car-free island of forest trails and beaches, including the much-photographed Lopes Mendes, reachable through Angra dos Reis and its scatter of hundreds of islands. Over the mountains behind the reserve is Cunha, a highland town known for its wood-fired ceramics studios and its lavender fields, a complete change of climate and mood barely an hour away. Further along the coast, into São Paulo state, is Ubatuba, a stretch of surf beaches and the site of a Projeto Tamar sea-turtle station. And up in the Serra da Bocaina, the viewpoint at Pedra da Macela gives, on a clear day, one of the great long views over the whole bay and its islands.

None of this is on the reserve, and none of it needs to be. The point is that a gathering up in the forest can sit at the heart of a real trip — a few days in the quiet before or after, guests exploring the coast and the highlands on the surrounding days, everyone converging on the mountain for the part that matters. We are glad to help you think through the shape of that, and the town, coast, island, and highland pages across the site go into each of these places properly.

Planning the practical side

Getting a group to the reserve is part of the plan, not an afterthought, because we are up a mountain and not at the end of a motorway. Most guests reach Paraty first — it sits on the coast road between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, within a few hours of either — and then come up to the reserve from there. The final approach is a mountain road, so arrivals are coordinated rather than left to chance, particularly for a group arriving around a single date. When you enquire, we will walk you through how people actually get here and how to stage arrivals so nobody is left guessing on a dark mountain road.

Timing the logistics is where a small, honest team earns its keep. A gathering here has more moving parts than a stay does — arrivals to stagger, meals to plan around the season, a ceremony or a schedule to build around the light, a weather fallback to hold ready. We keep all of that deliberately simple and low-impact, but simple is not the same as unplanned. The earlier we start, the calmer it all becomes, which is the whole reason we ask you to reach out well ahead rather than close to your dates.

What we handle, and what you bring

We handle the reserve: the setting, the low-impact framework, the food from the farm and the region, the practical path to your ceremony or your sessions, and honest guidance at every turn. For the parts that are personal to your day — an officiant or a teacher, a photographer, a celebrant, music, the specialists that make your gathering yours — you are welcome to bring the people you trust, provided they understand and respect how the reserve works. We would simply rather everyone come into it knowing the rules of the forest than discover them on arrival. When you get in touch, we can talk through which pieces we cover and which you will want to bring, so there are no surprises on either side.

How to enquire

If a gathering here sounds right, the next step is a conversation, not a form full of fixed packages. Every wedding, retreat, and buyout we host is shaped to the people, the season, and the part of the reserve that suits them, so the honest way to begin is to tell us what you have in mind and let us tell you plainly whether and how it works.

When you reach out, it helps to include a few basics: the kind of gathering you are imagining, a rough sense of numbers, the dates or the season you are considering, and anything that matters most to you about the day — a particular setting, a specific feeling, a non-negotiable. With that, we can tell you quickly whether we are the right place, suggest the settings and the timing that would suit you, and start building something real. Please start the conversation through our contact page, and give us as much lead time as you can, since the best dates and the fullest buyouts are planned well ahead.

One last thing, said as plainly as we can: we will always be honest with you about fit. If your vision needs more people, more infrastructure, or more control over the environment than a conservation reserve can offer, we will say so early and kindly, because a gathering that fights this place makes nobody happy — least of all you. But if what you want is a small, quiet, genuinely wild day among old trees and running water, with the whole thing arranged to leave the forest exactly as it found it, then this is, quite simply, one of the finest places on earth to have it. We would be glad to help you make it real. Start by telling us your plans through the contact page, or read how time on the reserve is arranged on the stays and booking page first.