Context :

Aims : R Coronae Australis ( R CrA ) is the brightest star of the Coronet nebula of the Corona Australis ( CrA ) star forming region .
It has very red colors , probably due to dust absorption and it is strongly variable .
High contrast instruments allow for an unprecedented direct exploration of the immediate circumstellar environment of this star .

Methods : We observed R CrA with the near-IR channels ( IFS and IRDIS ) of SPHERE at VLT .
In this paper , we used four different epochs , three of them from open time observations while one is from the SPHERE guaranteed time .
The data were reduced using the DRH pipeline and the SPHERE Data Center .
On the reduced data we implemented custom IDL routines with the aim to subtract the speckle halo .
We have also obtained pupil-tracking H-band ( 1.45-1.85 \mu m ) observations with the VLT/SINFONI near-infrared medium-resolution ( R \sim 3000 ) spectrograph .

Results : A companion was found at a separation of 0.156 ^ { \prime \prime } from the star in the first epoch and increasing to 0.184 ^ { \prime \prime } in the final one .
Furthermore , several extended structures were found around the star , the most noteworthy of which is a very bright jet-like structure North-East from the star .
The astrometric measurements of the companion in the four epochs confirm that it is gravitationally bound to the star .
The SPHERE photometry and the SINFONI spectrum , once corrected for extinction , point toward an early M spectral type object with a mass between 0.3 and 0.55 M _ { \odot } .
The astrometric analyis provides constraints on the orbit paramenters : e \sim 0.4 , semi-major axis at 27-28 au , inclination of \sim 70 ^ { \circ } and a period larger than 30 years .
We were also able to put constraints of few M _ { \mathrm { Jup } } on the mass of possible other companions down to separations of few tens of au .

Conclusions :