🇧🇷 Brazil · Southeast
Angra dos Reis is one of Brazil's great boating paradises, a jagged bay on the Costa Verde of Rio state dotted, by tradition, with some 365 islands and hundreds of beaches of calm, clear water. Set between Rio de Janeiro and historic Paraty, it combines the deep green of the Mata Atlântica with an emerald sea, ideal for boat trips (escunas), diving and snorkelling.
The big draw is sailing between islands such as Ilha Grande (the largest of them all), Cataguases, Botinas or the famous Lagoa Azul, stopping to swim in crystal-clear water. The town of Angra, colonial in origin, keeps its churches and a historic centre, but most visitors use it as a base for heading out to sea. It is also a destination of marinas, sailing boats and summer houses.
This guide covers the essentials of Angra dos Reis: the boat trips around the islands, the best beaches and swimming spots, the historic centre, how to get to Ilha Grande, where to eat fish and seafood and how to get here from Rio or Paraty. It is an ideal destination for anyone who loves the sea, sailing and tropical nature.
Angra dos Reis was sighted by Portuguese navigators at the start of the 16th century (the name recalls their arrival around Epiphany) and grew as a colonial town and port. For centuries it lived off trade, first tied to the gold and coffee cycles coming down from the sierra, and later off fishing and port work. In the 20th century it added industrial and port infrastructure, while its coastline of islands and beaches established itself as one of the country's main boating destinations.
Read the full history ↓The Cidade Maravilhosa and its state: from Villegagnon's França Antártica to the founding by Estácio de Sá in 1565, from the gold of Minas to the Portuguese court of 1808, capital of the Empire and of the Republic for almost two centuries. Land of Christ the Redeemer and Sugarloaf, of carnival and bossa nova, and of a coastline running from Búzios to colonial Paraty.
Read the history of Rio de Janeiro →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
On 6 January 1502 —Epiphany—, so tradition has it, the sailors of one of the first Portuguese expeditions surveying the coast of Brazil entered a sheltered bay, strewn with green islands as far as the eye could see. Naming it was easy: 'angra' means cove, and that was the cove of the Kings. More than five centuries on, the name is unchanged and the landscape that dazzled those sailors —the emerald sea, the rainforest dropping into the water, the '365 islands'— is exactly what still brings travellers here. Rarely does a place name tell the origin of somewhere so well: Angra dos Reis is, literally, the 'bay of the Kings'.
Before the Europeans arrived, the region was inhabited by indigenous peoples, the Tupinambá in particular, who lived off the sea and the rainforest. With Portuguese colonisation, the area was slowly drawn into the network of coastal settlements, in a process marked by conflicts with the indigenous population and with other European powers prowling the coast.
Through the 16th and 17th centuries, Angra took shape as a colonial town and port, with the building of churches and convents that are still part of its historic centre today, such as the Convento de São Bernardino de Sena. Its position on a sheltered bay full of islands made it a strategic point on the coast of what is now the Rio de Janeiro region.
Through the 18th and 19th centuries, Angra dos Reis went through spells of prosperity tied to its role as a port. During the gold cycle, part of the wealth coming down from the interior sought a way out through the coastal ports, and later, during the coffee boom in the Paraíba river valley, Angra and the neighbouring ports of the Costa Verde played a part in shipping goods to international markets.
The region's economy revolved around maritime trade, fishing and farming, on a coast still relatively cut off by the barrier of the Serra do Mar. The port traffic left its mark on the architecture and the layout of the town, which combined its seafaring calling with its colonial religious heritage.
In time, changes in trade routes and in transport made Angra's traditional importance as a port decline. But being a sheltered bay, ringed by islands and lush nature, it had a different fate in store for the following century: becoming one of Brazil's great boating and tourism settings.
The 20th century transformed Angra dos Reis from top to bottom. On one hand, the region added large-scale industrial and port infrastructure, with the building of a major port, an oil terminal and, in the following decades, the Angra nuclear power plant, set on the municipality's coast. These works coexisted, not without friction, with the area's natural and tourist calling.
On the other hand, the opening of the Rio-Santos road (BR-101), which linked Rio de Janeiro with Santos along the coast by way of Angra and Paraty, was decisive for tourism. Once it became reachable by land, the bay of the 365 islands revealed itself as a boating paradise within reach of the big cities of the southeast, drawing summer visitors, marinas, sailing boats and elite holiday homes.
Since then, Angra dos Reis has established itself as one of the main destinations on the Costa Verde of Rio state: escuna trips between islands, beaches of crystal-clear water such as the Lagoa Azul, diving and nearby Ilha Grande make up its great draw today. The town thus holds on to a double identity, between port and industry on one side and sea and nature tourism on the other, and that is what defines its contemporary character.
One of the most singular marks of modern Angra is the Central Nuclear Almirante Álvaro Alberto, on Itaorna beach, on the municipality's coast. The first unit, Angra 1, began commercial operation in 1985, followed by Angra 2, connected to the grid in 2000 and in commercial operation since 2001; between them they make Angra dos Reis the only city in Brazil producing nuclear power. Building the plant, along with a large port and an oil terminal (TEBIG, run by Petrobras), gave the municipality an industrial profile unusual for a beach destination.
This coexistence of heavy industry and nature tourism has not been free of controversy. Debates about nuclear safety, evacuation plans for the region and the environmental impact on the bay accompanied the plant's development for decades, in an area that was at the same time being promoted for the purity of its water and its biodiversity. The stop-start construction of a third unit, Angra 3, dragged on for years as a symbol of those tensions.
Even so, Angra's tourist course took firm hold. The bay of the '365 islands', Ilha Grande —which in the 20th century even housed a famous prison, now shut down— and the beaches of the Costa Verde became one of the country's main boating settings. In recent decades, tourist pressure has led the authorities to take management measures, such as entry registration and sustainable tourism fees for Ilha Grande, in an effort to balance the huge flow of visitors against the preservation of an exceptional natural heritage.
The most extraordinary story in the bay is hidden on its largest island. For more than a century, Ilha Grande —today a byword for idyllic beaches— was a place nobody wanted to go. In the 1880s the Empire set up a lazaretto there, a quarantine station where ships arriving from Europe had to isolate their passengers for fear of epidemics such as cholera. Shortly after, in 1903, the Republic founded a penal colony in the Dois Rios inlet, the seed of what would become one of the most feared prisons in Brazil.
The Instituto Penal Cândido Mendes, in Vila Dois Rios, ran for much of the 20th century as a 'Brazilian Alcatraz', cut off from civilisation by the sea and the rainforest. Ordinary prisoners passed through its cells and political ones too: in 1936, under Getúlio Vargas's government, the writer Graciliano Ramos was held there, and he would leave an account of the experience in his classic 'Memórias do Cárcere'. Decades later, under the military dictatorship, political and ordinary prisoners living side by side on the island gave rise, towards the end of the 1970s, to the criminal organisation that would come to be known as the Comando Vermelho: an unforeseen and dark consequence of that prison policy.
The prison was shut down and demolished in 1994, and its end marked the island's rebirth. Paradoxically, a century of forced isolation had saved it from the property speculation that transformed other stretches of the coast: the Mata Atlântica stayed almost untouched, with no roads and no buildings. The destination of today was built on that legacy —small-scale pousadas in Vila do Abraão, trails, untouched beaches such as Lopes Mendes— and in the ruins of the prison there is now a museum run by the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), which keeps an environmental studies centre at Dois Rios.
The crowning moment came in 2019, when UNESCO inscribed the site 'Paraty e Ilha Grande – Culture and Biodiversity' on the World Heritage list, Brazil's first mixed site (cultural and natural). The recognition sealed the bay's fate: that anchorage for navigators, port of gold and coffee, prison and quarantine station, is today one of the most valuable sanctuaries of nature and boating tourism in South America, with the standing challenge of not letting fame destroy what isolation managed to preserve.