Ilha Grande should, by rights, be a resort strip. It is a large, gorgeous island a short hop from two of Brazil’s biggest draws, Rio de Janeiro and the colonial town of Paraty. Instead it is a protected reserve of Atlantic rainforest with no cars, no real roads, and more than a hundred beaches, most of them undeveloped. The reason is its strange history.
For most of the last century the island was somewhere you were sent, not somewhere you visited. It held a quarantine station, a leper colony and, for decades, one of Brazil’s most feared prisons. That kept tourism and development away entirely, and when the prison was finally torn down in the 1990s what remained was an island frozen in a wilder time. The dark past is exactly why the nature is so intact.
What that leaves you with today is rare: an island you explore the slow way, on foot through the forest or by boat around the coast, where the busiest thing that happens is a schooner pulling into a cove. It is the barefoot, switch-off chapter of a Brazil trip, and it pairs perfectly with the buzz of Rio just up the coast.
