Ilha do Mel

After having been to Rosario and Córdoba, where the star of the trip was music, I returned to Buenos Aires to take a plane and “hop over” to Curitiba in Brazil, in the southern state of Paraná.

I went to visit a friend who had decided to celebrate her birthday at the “Ilha do Mel” (the name says it all), an hour by car and half an hour by boat from Curitiba. The island is enchanting, and coming here out of season lets you fully enjoy the landscape without too many tourists underfoot and relax properly on the white-sand beaches or stretched out in the countless hammocks of the posadas that dot the island.

Considering that the summer season ended long ago and that for the rest of the year it usually rains a lot, I must say I was very lucky to find fine days of strong sun and an incredibly blue sky. The island is a true earthly paradise: for most of its surface (2,700 hectares) it is covered in dense woods, within which, among the various animals, you can come across rare kinds of parrot. The entire green part is a very striking ecological reserve.

The posadas built of wood that offer hospitality to visitors are exactly what a body stressed by work or by any other form of stress needs most. Immersed in the green of the forest, far from one another, full of temptations and vices.

On the Ilha do Mel the biggest problem to solve is choosing whether to spend the day at the water's edge or “within the walls of home”. What struck me most about the posadas are the details and the “exaggeration in the cult of pleasure”: nothing is left to chance; everywhere mattresses, sofas, hammocks, couches. Little open-air living rooms with, in every corner, a series of objects that carry the mind even further away. The posadas offer breakfast in the morning, with many exotic and energising fruits. For lunch and dinner there are the various little restaurants where the best dishes are obviously fish-based. Fresh and cheap.

Unfortunately the island does not offer much musically. However, it is enough to move by boat to another fantastic island called Guaraqueçaba to be able to listen to the fascinating Fandango: see