Qualla: Monte Pascoal National Park

Monte Pascoal National Park: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eduardo Martins Soares, CC BY 2.0. Long before it was the first land the Portuguese saw, it was simply the hill. It rises 586 metres out of a coastal plain that is otherwise nearly flat, which is why a lookout on Pedro Álvares Cabral's fleet picked it up from far out at sea on 22 April 1500, and why the Pataxó had been steering by it for generations already. Cabral's scribe, Pero Vaz de Caminha, recorded what the Portuguese did next: "the captain called it the Mount of Easter and the land Land of the True Cross." Nobody on those ships wrote down what the people living beneath it called it. The national park that now wraps the mountain carries the Portuguese name, and most of what has happened here since has been an argument about who the forest belongs to.

Image: Eduardo Martins Soares | CC BY 2.0

Monte Pascoal National Park: A Park Drawn Over a Homeland

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eduardo Martins Soares, CC BY 2.0. Decree 242, signed on 29 November 1961, created Monte Pascoal National Park across 22,332 hectares of Atlantic Forest in the municipalities of Porto Seguro and Prado. What the decree did not do was ask. Roughly 8,627 hectares of the new park sat on the Barra Velha indigenous land...

Image: Eduardo Martins Soares | CC BY 2.0

Monte Pascoal National Park: The Fire of 1951

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Julian Choquette, CC BY 3.0. Ten years before the park existed, the Pataxó village of Barra Velha burned. The trigger was a robbery: two men who had attached themselves to the Indian Protection Service, the federal agency nominally charged with defending indigenous people, robbed a merchant at Corumbau and s...

Image: Julian Choquette | CC BY 3.0

Monte Pascoal National Park: Retomada

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mário C. Bucci, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1999, the Pataxó took the park back. The retomada, the retaking, ended nearly four decades in which the community had been treated as an obstacle to the forest rather than part of it, and it forced a rethink of how the place would be run. Management is now shared between ICMBi...

Image: Mário C. Bucci | CC BY-SA 2.0

Monte Pascoal National Park: What the Forest Still Holds

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chewbacca, CC BY 2.0. The Atlantic Forest once ran the length of Brazil's coast and now survives in fragments, which is precisely why these 22,000 hectares matter out of proportion to their size. Jaguars and cougars still move through it. So do giant armadillos, and a roll of birds that exists almost ...

Image: Chewbacca | CC BY 2.0

Monte Pascoal National Park: Standing Underneath It

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daniel Souza Lima, CC BY-SA 3.0. About eight thousand people visit in a typical year, which is remarkably few for a landmark this loaded. Trails run through lowland rainforest toward viewpoints on the mountain, mangrove and restinga edge the coastal side, and rainfall of 1,500 to 1,700 millimetres a year keeps e...

Image: Daniel Souza Lima | CC BY-SA 3.0