Paraiba do Sul calls itself the pioneer municipality of the Serra Fluminense - the mountainous fringe of Rio de Janeiro state - and disseminator of civilization in what the 18th-century called the backlands of Paraiba. That claim rests on Garcia's work between 1683 and 1700. The farm he built on the backwater fed expeditions with corn and river fish and game hunted from the virgin forest at the edge of the Atlantic frontier. The workforce included indigenous Puri people enslaved by Garcia's household, and mixed-heritage people called curibocas and guainas from the Sao Paulo plateau - held against their will and laboring to open a road whose purpose was to move gold past them toward Portuguese ships. Between 1698 and 1700 Garcia extended the stretch from Paraiba down to Rio de Janeiro. By 1704 the road had reached the Mantiqueira Mountains, and near present-day Barbacena it joined the older road coming up from Sao Paulo. Two routes converging on the gold. One man, twenty years old when he began, still only forty when he died in 1738 the richest man in colonial Brazil.

When Tiradentes - Joaquim Jose da Silva Xavier, leader of the failed Inconfidencia Mineira of 1789 - was hanged in Rio de Janeiro in 1792, Portuguese authorities dismembered his body and displayed parts along the road between Rio and Ouro Preto as a warning. In the village of Sebolas, within the municipality of Paraiba do Sul, two of those pieces - an arm and part of the left chest - were taken down from their display posts and interred in the cemetery of a local farm. Today that cemetery is a meadow where cattle graze. The only confirmed burial of any part of Tiradentes's remains sits under grass with no monument to mark it. The local Historical and Geographical Institute has long proposed creating Sebolas Historic Park on the site, with support from national cultural foundations. The proposal has not yet been realized. For now, the passing traveler would not know they were standing above the physical remains of one of Brazil's founding martyrs.

Paraiba do Sul sits at 306 meters elevation, on the river that gave it its name. Its area is divided across rugged terrain, with the highest point - the Pedra do Apontador, or Stone of Stakeout - reaching roughly 700 meters in the district of Vila Salutaris. The pioneers used its summit as an observation point, watching for movement across the surrounding hills; the name records that use. Elsewhere the municipality runs across a handful of other peaks - the High Sierras of Dryland at 858 meters, Retiro at 800, Cavaru at 700, Catete at 535 - and the soils range across latosol, podzolic, and Oxisols types familiar to regional agronomy. The city has three major bridges: two for automobiles and one for trains, crossing the Paraiba do Sul River that the town was founded on. Its century-old car bridge was built at the urging of the Baron of Maua, one of 19th-century Brazil's leading industrialists and railway promoters. The population was 44,518 in 2020.

The town has quietly produced or hosted figures connected to Brazilian cultural history. The first wife of composer Heitor Villa-Lobos came from Paraiba do Sul - a pianist in her own right who helped edit her husband's scores. Other lesser-known figures in arts, politics, and literature were born here or killed here, their stories layered into the town's continuing sense of itself as a participant in Brazilian civilization rather than a bystander to it. In one of the more unexpected contemporary touches, the town contains a bronze statue of Yasser Arafat - a gift that made international news in 2005 when the former Palestinian president was honored in this small Rio de Janeiro municipality. It also contains a statue dedicated to Che Guevara. Whatever political winds produced those monuments, they sit now beside the colonial history, the gold-road history, the Tiradentes meadow, the Villa-Lobos memory, and the waterfalls and rural hillside hotels that draw modern visitors from the coast.