Paraty’s Phantoms

A World Heritage UNESCO town hemmed in by idyllic islands and the Mata Atlantica, Paraty is a carefully preserved facsimile of old-world Iberian architecture, littered with art shops, and camera-ready painted window frames. Famed for its gastronomy and literary festival that draws renowned authors  from around the world, its streets heave with visitors who delight at the ankle breaking cobbles and caiçara culture neatly wrapped in tourist parchment. Except, this place, like all imperial colonial inventions shouldn’t by rights exist. They may be quaint and picturesque, but ‘historic’ works of architecture like Paraty are invariably rooted in the violent exploitation of human labour. Paraty was both a key entry point for kidnapped Africans and the exit port for gold. It was enslaved labour that built the town, worked the mines, and constructed the ‘Estrada Real,’ ordered by the then King of Portugal to expedite the export of precious minerals. This one and a half thousand-kilometre compacted stone road links the diamond and gold mines that surround the baroque towns of Minas Gerais to Rio and Paraty. It too is signposted as a tourist highlight, camouflaging what was in reality a web of suffering that cast its spectral shadow across the Atlantic to Africa and Europe. Not only did Brasilian gold line the cathedral precincts and royal courts of Portugal, but also the banking houses of eighteenth-century Britain. Through the economic blackmail of the 1703 Methuen treaty, duties were lowered on the import of Portuguese wine into England, in exchange for which Portugal was obliged to buy English textiles with gold bullion. This accelerated the technological transformation of British manufacturing and helped lay the foundations of the industrial revolution. At the height of the gold rush, twenty-five thousand kilos of bullion arrived in London from Brasil, the majority of the world’s then gold reserves, thus transforming the city into the banking centre of Europe that in turn laid the foundations for British global hegemony.