This week’s dream:

cobbled streets and rainforests in Brazil

Paraty is the kind of place people “struggle” to leave, says Dan Linstead in Wanderlust magazine. This tranquil little town on Brazil’s Costa Verde dates back to the 17th century, when its cobbled streets “bustled” with Portuguese gold traders, colonists and slavers. Lying between rainforested mountains and a sparkling bay, it “boasts perhaps the finest collection of Portuguese colonial buildings in the world”. But life here today is wonderfully slow-paced: “impatient” gringo visitors must learn to loosen up, and sink into Paraty’s “sleepy embrace”.

The town has many “architectural quirks” – streets built below sea level (so that debris is washed away at high tide), and, on the older houses, “wonky red roof tiles”, each one shaped by “wrapping the clay around the thigh of a slave girl”. On the pretty seafront, “zanily coloured boats nuzzle the jetty, and vultures patrol” the shallows. The coastline here is fjord-like – and perfectly explored by boat. A 20-minute “zip across the bay” leads to a “jungled” promontory that is deserted save for a few fisherman’s huts and “the abandoned villa of a 1950s movie star”. Nearby, you’ll find the kind of beaches that even sand haters would have “to grudgingly applaud”.

For a rainforest fix, the Mata Atlântica is “right in Paraty’s backyard”. Although it has been “hacked back to a fraction of its former grandeur”, it is still “extraordinarily biodiverse”. A short “amble” takes you past gnarled old trunks and “musty sweet tangles of ferns, cacti and lianas, speckled by distant sunlight”. The humidity makes it “super-fertile”: the forest is reclaiming its territory “with rapacious speed”. One final Paraty delight awaits: a night-time swim in the bay, where bioluminescent organisms cast their “magical” glow, and, in the darkness, your limbs “trail stars”.

Last Frontiers (01296-653000; www.lastfrontiers.com) arranges 12-day trips taking in Paraty from 3,650pp, including flights.