🇧🇷 Brazil · Southeast
Ilha Grande is the largest island in the bay of Angra dos Reis, a paradise of preserved Mata Atlântica, dream beaches and crystal-clear water on the Costa Verde of Rio state. Car-free —you get around only on foot or by boat— it keeps a quiet, wild feel, with more than a hundred beaches, trails through the rainforest, waterfalls and rich marine life. Its most famous beach, Lopes Mendes, regularly appears among the most beautiful in Brazil.
The main village is Vila do Abraão, where the pousadas, restaurants, agencies and the pier are concentrated. The trails and the boats out to the beaches and dive sites all start there. The island is part of protected areas that shield its rainforest and its coastline, and its past includes a dark spell as the site of a prison, now in ruins.
This guide covers the essentials of Ilha Grande: the best beaches (Lopes Mendes, Aventureiro, Lagoa Azul), the rainforest trails, the diving and boat trips, the Vila do Abraão, how to get here by boat from the mainland and how to get around without cars. It is an ideal destination for nature, beach, walking and switching off.
Once inhabited by indigenous peoples and later a stopover for sailors, smugglers and pirates in colonial times, Ilha Grande spent much of the 20th century put to uses that depended on its isolation: a quarantine station for the sick and, above all, a maximum-security prison (the Instituto Penal Cândido Mendes), which paradoxically helped preserve its nature by holding back development. After the prison was closed and demolished in 1994, the island established itself as an ecotourism destination, and its natural and historical whole was recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019 (together with Paraty). The full story is on our history page.
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.
Few islands in Brazil hide such a contradictory past: the same Ilha Grande that today ranks among the country's beach paradises was, in different centuries, a pirate hideout, a quarantine station for the sick and the site of one of the most feared prisons in the nation. And, paradoxically, it was that dark history that saved its rainforest. But let us start at the beginning, long before the guns and the bars.
Before the Europeans arrived, Ilha Grande was inhabited by indigenous peoples, the Tupinambá in particular, who lived by fishing, hunting and foraging on an island covered in lush Mata Atlântica. The abundance of sheltered bays, fresh water and marine resources made the island a favourable place for human life. With Portuguese colonisation in the 16th century, its strategic position —right on the coastal route between the ports of the southeast— made it a stopover for sailors and, by tradition, a refuge for smugglers and pirates who used its hidden coves to anchor and stash goods. The waters of the bay of Angra, strewn with more than three hundred islands, were a perfect labyrinth for those clandestine activities.
Through the colonial period and the 19th century, the island had a population devoted to fishing and small-scale farming, in relative isolation. That distance from the main centres would, in time, be the key to the uses the island was put to in the 20th century: a remote place, ideal both for isolating disease and for locking up prisoners.
The isolation of Ilha Grande shaped much of its history in the 19th and 20th centuries. First a lazareto operated there, a health station where immigrants and travellers were quarantined to stop contagious diseases spreading, making use of the natural separation the island offered from the mainland. That quarantine building, now in ruins near the Vila do Abraão, is one of the remains you can still see.
Later the island became the site of penal institutions. Before the modern prison there was the Colônia Correcional de Dois Rios, notorious for a block nicknamed the 'Caldeirão do Diabo' (the Devil's Cauldron) because of its harsh conditions. On that legacy the Instituto Penal Cândido Mendes was built, a maximum-security prison that through the 20th century held both dangerous common criminals and political prisoners, above all during the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985). Criminals and left-wing militants shared its cells, and out of that forced mix came, according to a widely repeated account, the Falange Vermelha, the embryo of the Comando Vermelho, one of Brazil's biggest criminal organisations. Its blocks held figures who would later tell their story, such as the journalist and politician Fernando Gabeira.
That prison function had, however, an unexpected and positive consequence: throughout those years access to the island was restricted and urban and tourist development was held back. While much of the southeastern coast was urbanised at speed, Ilha Grande kept its rainforest and its beaches largely intact, as if the prison had acted as an unwitting guardian of its nature. That paradox —a feared jail that saved a paradise— is now one of the destination's most fascinating stories.
The big change came in 1994, when the Dois Rios prison was decommissioned and demolished. Freed from its prison past, Ilha Grande could turn its fate towards what its preserved nature offered: ecotourism. The Vila do Abraão grew as a visitor base, and the beaches, the trails through the Mata Atlântica and the crystal-clear waters of the bay drew travellers from all over the world.
The island was folded into a set of protected natural areas covering both its rainforest and its coastline, with rules limiting building and banning cars, keeping its wild character. Beaches such as Lopes Mendes became icons of Brazilian nature tourism, and the trails to waterfalls, viewpoints and Dois Rios itself —with the ruins of the old prison turned into a museum— combine landscape and historical memory.
In 2019, the ensemble formed by Paraty and Ilha Grande was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, in a mixed category recognising both its cultural value and its exceptional biodiversity. So the island that for decades was a byword for confinement is today a symbol of conservation, nature and sustainable tourism, a rare example of how forced isolation ended up protecting a natural treasure.
Beyond its human history, Ilha Grande is above all an exceptional nature sanctuary. It covers close to 193 km² and holds one of the largest continuous stretches of preserved Mata Atlântica in the state of Rio de Janeiro, a biome that was cleared across the rest of the country and of which only fragments survive. That lush rainforest, with its hills, waterfalls and woodland, is home to remarkable biodiversity: monkeys (such as the howler monkey), sloths, a great variety of birds —toucans, hummingbirds, birds of prey— and abundant marine life in its waters.
The island's legal protection was built up through several overlapping conservation areas: the Parque Estadual da Ilha Grande, the Reserva Biológica Estadual da Praia do Sul and a marine park, which together cover the rainforest, the coastline and the reefs. These areas regulate tourism, limit building and maintain the ban on cars, in an effort to balance visits with the conservation of a fragile ecosystem.
The island is also a valuable laboratory for science: in the old prison area of Dois Rios there is an environmental studies centre run by the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), dedicated to research into the Mata Atlântica and coastal ecosystems. So the very place that was a jail for decades is today a setting for studying and protecting nature, sealing Ilha Grande's transformation into an emblem of conservation on the Costa Verde.