Vista Linda sits above Corumbê, on the hillside just north of Paraty — about 240 km from Rio de Janeiro and 290 km from São Paulo, which in practice means roughly four hours from Rio and five from São Paulo, depending on traffic and how often you stop to photograph the coast. You will want to stop.
From Rio
Take the BR-101 — the Rio-Santos — south along the Costa Verde. Past Angra dos Reis the road becomes one of Brazil's great drives: rainforest on the right, islands on the left, the bay opening and closing between headlands. Corumbê arrives a few minutes before Paraty itself, so you're home before the town.
From São Paulo
The usual route runs via the Tamoios highway to the coast at Caraguatatuba, then north through Ubatuba on the BR-101. The mountain alternative via Cunha descends to Paraty on a partly cobbled historic road with spectacular views — worth it in daylight, in dry weather, in no hurry.
Provisioning a full house
With up to sixteen people, groceries are a logistics event, and Paraty is well equipped for it: proper supermarkets on the edge of town on the BR-101, the municipal market for fish, and roadside stands for fruit. Our advice is to arrive, unload, and do one big shop the first evening — the kitchen's fridge-freezer plus the three extra freezers (veranda, game floor, gourmet area) swallow a week of supplies for a full house without complaint.
The first evening
It has a pattern by now. Cars into the garage — it takes five. Rooms claimed, the master suite negotiated. Someone finds the light switches for the pool; someone else finds the hammocks. The barbecue gets lit more or less immediately, because it's there and because you drove past a butcher on the way in. And at some point everyone ends up on the veranda at once, looking at the bay, saying some version of the same sentence. The photographs had not been exaggerating.