News - Snake Island: Brazil's Forbidden Paradise of Venomous Vipers

Tucked 21 miles off the coast of São Paulo, Brazil lies Ilha da Queimada Grande, popularly referred to as Snake Island. This small yet dangerous strip of land is notorious for harboring thousands of the highly venomous golden lancehead vipers, a species found nowhere else on Earth. Isolated for millennia, these serpents have made the island their formidable fortress. Once, humans tried to colonize it, even going as far as to burn swathes of its dense vegetation in futile attempts to settle. In the early 1900s, lighthouse keepers resided there until the lighthouse was automated, but it wasn’t the infamous serpents that drove them away. With human absence, snakes flourished, cementing Ilha da Queimada Grande’s reputation as a lethal snake haven. Today, the island's only occasional visitors are researchers, keen on studying its unique biodiversity, and the Brazilian Navy servicemen tasked with maintaining the automated lighthouse. For tourists, however, the island remains out of reach, a perilous paradise left to its snake rulers, admired only from afar.