Decree 242, signed on 29 November 1961, created Monte Pascoal National Park across 22,332 hectares of Atlantic Forest in the municipalities of Porto Seguro and Prado. What the decree did not do was ask. Roughly 8,627 hectares of the new park sat on the Barra Velha indigenous land, and the Pataxó who lived in and from that forest were pushed out of the largest surviving stand of it and absorbed, on unfavourable terms, into the towns and cities around. Conservation and dispossession arrived as a single document. A modifying decree followed on 20 April 2000, and the park is administered today by the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, ICMBio, in a shared arrangement with FUNAI, the federal indigenous affairs agency. That the two agencies now share the file is itself the residue of a fight.

Ten years before the park existed, the Pataxó village of Barra Velha burned. The trigger was a robbery: two men who had attached themselves to the Indian Protection Service, the federal agency nominally charged with defending indigenous people, robbed a merchant at Corumbau and set off unrest among Pataxó from Barra Velha. What followed was not policing but punishment. Police detachments from Porto Seguro and Prado moved on the village in June 1951. One indigenous person and two non-indigenous leaders were killed. Thirty-eight Pataxó were arrested, among them Captain Honório Borges, the village's own leader. The houses were burned, and the survivors scattered into the forest and the surrounding country. Most of them drifted back over the following years. Honório Borges did not; after prison he settled elsewhere. In Pataxó memory the episode has a name of its own, the Fogo de 1951, and it is the hinge on which the community's twentieth century turns.

In 1999, the Pataxó took the park back. The retomada, the retaking, ended nearly four decades in which the community had been treated as an obstacle to the forest rather than part of it, and it forced a rethink of how the place would be run. Management is now shared between ICMBio and FUNAI, and the Pataxó operate ethno-tourism inside the park alongside the conventional trails and viewpoints. Language came back at roughly the same time. The Pataxó language had stopped being spoken as a first language, and from 1998 a research group called Atxôhã worked through historical records and elders' memories to reconstruct it as Patxohã, now taught in village schools. Recognition has followed the same curve: Brazil's 2010 census recorded 13,588 Pataxó; the 2022 census counted 39,276.

The Atlantic Forest once ran the length of Brazil's coast and now survives in fragments, which is precisely why these 22,000 hectares matter out of proportion to their size. Jaguars and cougars still move through it. So do giant armadillos, and a roll of birds that exists almost nowhere else: red-billed curassow, banded cotinga, black-headed berryeater, red-browed amazon, ochre-marked parakeet, white-necked hawk, band-tailed antwren. Smaller things are on the protected list too, including the forest fish Mimagoniates sylvicola and the giant ant Dinoponera lucida. In 1999 the park was inscribed as part of the Discovery Coast Atlantic Forest Reserves, a World Heritage cluster of eight protected areas covering 112,000 hectares, and in 2002 it was folded into the Central Atlantic Forest Ecological Corridor, an attempt to stitch the surviving fragments back into something a jaguar can actually cross.

About eight thousand people visit in a typical year, which is remarkably few for a landmark this loaded. Trails run through lowland rainforest toward viewpoints on the mountain, mangrove and restinga edge the coastal side, and rainfall of 1,500 to 1,700 millimetres a year keeps everything dripping. The management plan is still being written, decades after the park was drawn. Look up at the green dome from the plain below and it is easy to see what the lookout saw in 1500 and easy to forget the rest: that the sighting was an arrival, not a discovery, and that the people watching the ships come in are still here, running the trail you walked in on.