Serra da Bocaina

Serra da Bocaina National Park was created by federal decree in 1971 on the boundary between the states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, with its administrative seat in São José do Barreiro. It protects a sector of the Serra do Mar, known here as the Serra da Bocaina, whose rugged relief exceeds 2,000 metres in altitude and drops abruptly to the coast, forming a natural amphitheatre of Atlantic forest above Ilha Grande Bay.

That continuous drop, from summit to sea, is the key to its value: it allows every belt of the Mata Atlântica to follow on without interruption, from high-altitude forest to restinga and coastal mangrove, a continuum that has disappeared across almost all the rest of the biome. The biodiversity is extraordinary: 150 mammal species have been recorded across the area, among them the jaguar and the muriqui, the largest primate on the American continent, along with 27 reptiles, 125 anurans and 36 rare plant species.

On 5 July 2019 UNESCO inscribed the property Paraty and Ilha Grande: Culture and Biodiversity, Brazil's first mixed site and the first in Latin America to recognise a living culture, as against other mixed properties in the region that protect archaeological sites in a natural setting. The property is serial and made up of six elements: four protected areas — Serra da Bocaina National Park, Ilha Grande State Park, the Praia do Sul State Biological Reserve and the Cairuçu Environmental Protection Area — plus the Historic Centre of Paraty and the Morro da Vila Velha. A stretch of the Gold Trail also runs through the park, the colonial route that carried the metal from Minas Gerais to the port of Paraty, now turned into a footpath.