The Carijós and Tupiniquins peoples were the first to know these islands, living along their shores long before Portuguese settlers arrived in the 1500s. The colonizers found little to exploit and established no permanent settlements of consequence. In 1852, the Swiss consulate sent 15 families to try their luck on Superagüi Island, but the settlement never grew. A few descendants of those families still live on park lands today, their presence a quiet footnote in a place that has otherwise resisted human ambition. The park was folded into the Atlantic Forest Biosphere Reserve in 1991, declared a Brazilian national park in 1998, and recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999 as part of the Atlantic Forest South-East Reserves.

More than 2,000 red-tailed Amazon parrots roost on Superagüi's islands, and the best time to see them is also the least convenient: dawn, when the flocks erupt from the forest canopy and scatter across the sky in search of food. Dusk brings a mirror performance as the birds return. Between those bookends, the park's distinct ecosystems reveal themselves layer by layer -- sandy coastal beaches fringed with dune grass, mangrove swamps threading along river channels, and dense tropical forest draped with orchids, jacaranda, and ipê trees. In the Baía dos Golfinhos on Ilha das Peças, pods of dolphins give the bay its name, surfacing in the still water between forested shorelines.

The park's beaches stretch for 38 kilometers without a single building, road, or pier. Dunes pile up behind coastal grasses that bend in the Atlantic breeze, and the sand trails off into the distance with nothing to interrupt the line where land meets water. The archipelago includes Superagüi Island, Peças Island, Pinheiro Island, and tiny Pinheirinho Island, each separated by channels and mangrove-fringed waterways. Getting here requires a ferry from the port city of Paranaguá -- a 90-minute crossing aboard a boat called, with no apparent irony, the Megatron. Once you arrive, the modern world recedes. There are no cars, no resort complexes, and no crowds to speak of. What remains is coast, forest, and the sound of waves.

Before Portuguese colonization, the Atlantic Forest blanketed 1.3 million square kilometers of Brazil's coast -- roughly 15 percent of the country's total area. Today, barely 7 percent of that original forest survives. Superagüi is one of the places where it persists, a fragment of what was once continuous canopy stretching from the tropics to the subtropics. The brown howler monkey swings through the upper branches. Venomous jararaca and coral snakes patrol the forest floor. The park's lowland marshes and mangroves act as nurseries for marine life, filtering sediment and sheltering juvenile fish in their tangled roots. What UNESCO recognized in 1999 was not just scenic beauty but ecological urgency -- these are among the last intact coastal forests in southeastern Brazil, and the species that depend on them have nowhere else to go.