Drive ten minutes inland from Paraty and the road starts climbing into the Serra do Mar, under full rainforest canopy. This is the Paraty-Cunha road, and it concentrates two of the region's great pleasures within a few kilometers of each other: waterfalls you can swim in, and cachaça distilleries you can taste at. Do them in that order.
The swimming holes
The famous stop is the Cachoeira do Tobogã — a wide sheet of granite polished by the river into a natural slide, dropping into a deep forest pool. Locals descend it standing up, barefoot, as if it were nothing. It is not nothing. Go down sitting, feet first, like everyone sensible, and enjoy the show the locals put on instead. A short distance further is the Poço do Tarzan, a deep, shadowed pool below a cascade with the rope swing that names it. Watch where the locals jump before you jump.
The stills
For a stretch of the colonial era, 'paraty' didn't just mean this town — it was a common word for cachaça itself. The bay shipped barrels of cane spirit alongside the gold, and small family distilleries called alambiques have worked these hills ever since. Several still distill the old way — copper stills, natural fermentation, aging in Brazilian hardwoods — and welcome visitors for a walk-through and a tasting: Engenho D'Ouro and Maria Izabel are the classic stops. Taste the unaged white first, then the wood-aged golds, then the gabriela — cachaça mellowed with cinnamon and clove.
The right way to do it
Take one of the open-top jeep tours that leave Paraty daily: they combine two or three waterfalls with distillery stops on the same road, someone else drives, and the day sorts itself. Waterfalls in the cool of the morning, lunch, tastings after — that order matters, because wet granite and cachaça belong in separate halves of the day.
And then home: the jeep drops you in town, the house is ten minutes north, and the pool has been waiting all day to hear about it.