Bocaiuva Forest

Bocaiuva Forest was the wooded country behind Paranaguá, where humid Atlantic air rises over the slopes leading inland from the bay. Shell-midden communities lived along the shore long before colonial settlement, and the Carijó, a Guaraní subgroup, later inhabited the wider coast. Portuguese expeditions and slave raids disrupted these communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The forest supplied timber, game and routes into the interior, and in 1640 Gabriel de Lara arrived to strengthen the settlement around Paranaguá.