Paquetá Island

This guide to Paquetá Island in Rio de Janeiro traces how a patch of land worked by enslaved laborers under Portuguese rule became a car-free retreat, starting with the ferry terminal that opened in 1881 and turned raw cargo traffic into paying visitors. It follows the island's turn-of-the-century run as a fashionable weekend address for Rio's wealthy, the villas they built, and what happened once, in the 1970s, they simply stopped coming. Today the old guesthouses and waterfront restaurants still live off that same ferry crowd, one bicycle or carriage ride at a time.