Tourism Paraguay, visit Paraguay

Paraguay

Paraguay is a country of fascinating contrasts. It’s rustic and sophisticated. It’s extremely poor and obscenely wealthy. It boasts exotic natural reserves and massive man-made dams. It is a place where horses and carts pull up by Mercedes Benz cars, artisans’ workshops abut glitzy shopping centers and Jesuit ruins in rural villages near Encarnación are just a few kilometers from sophisticated colonial towns like Asunción. Steamy subtropical rainforests with metallic butterflies contrast with the dry and wild frontier of Northern Paraguay & the Chaco. Here, many Mennonites have created their haven, living alongside some of the country’s many indigenous groups, while the European influence is particularly strong in the laid-back towns like Filadelfia and the more chaotic capital.

Surprisingly, backpackers are rarer than pumas in Paraguay, but travel is always do-able – whether on a bone-rattling kamikaze-style bus trip or leisurely bobbing up the Río Paraguay aboard a rickety boat. While Paraguayans are more used to visits from their bordering neighbors, they are relaxed, kind and curious to anyone – share a tereré (iced herbal tea) and they will impart their country’s alluring secrets. The residual effects of dictators, corruption and contraband contribute to an overall sense that, for many years, much of Paraguayan life has taken place behind closed doors, as its people partake in public protests with confidence.

Mapa de Paraguay

Palacio de Gobierno, Asuncion, Paraguay

Asunción

It’s hard to get your head around Asunción. At heart she is beautiful, with a sprinkling of original colonial and beaux-arts buildings, international cuisine, shady plazas and friendly people. Her more-recent and modern demeanor boasts new, seemingly endless suburbs, ritzy shopping malls and smart nightclubs.

But her sophistication hides blemishes: the Río Paraguay backdrop and its shanty shacks, dengue fever–carrying mosquitoes, diesel-spewing buses, stark utilitarian architecture and oppressive heat and humidity.

Like a vain woman hiding her age but succumbing to middle-age spread, Asunción claims to have 1.2 million people, yet seems to hold many more – her sprawling suburbs have joined with neighboring towns. Despite her flaws, she’s well worth getting to know.


Ciudad del Este

You-name-it-they-got-it. The central streets of Ciudad del Este are like a giant, tacky electronic city market. Originally named after the former dictator, the town struggles to shake off its reputation as one of South America’s most corrupt cities. The busy border crossing can seem intimidating, but authorities are clamping down on the human pack-horses who hump suspicious boxes across the international bridge. Away from the area of cheap electronic goods, cigarettes and liquor, the city is pleasant enough with some excellent eateries if nothing else.

San bernardino, lago Ypacarai, Paraguay

Northern Paraguay & the Chaco

The Gran Chaco is the place to escape the crowds and experience raw wilderness. This vast plain – roughly divided into the Low Chaco (west of Asunción), Middle Chaco (the Mennonite region) and High Chaco (low density thorny scrub to the north) – encompasses the entire western half of Paraguay and stretches into Argentina and Bolivia. During the rainy season large tracts become swampy plains, while in dry weather it’s an arid dustbowl with harsh thorn forest.

Although the Chaco accounts for over 60% of Paraguayan territory, less than 3% of the population actually lives here. Historically it was a refuge for indigenous hunter-gatherers; today, several indigenous groups continue to live here – some have their assigned regions, following the assignment of land in the middle Chaco to the Mennonite communities in the 1930s. Close to the Río Paraguay, campesinos (rural dwellers practicing subsistence agriculture) have built picturesque houses of palm logs while army bases and cattle estancias (extensive grazing establishments) inhabit the denser thorn forests of the high Chaco.

Over recent years Brazilian settlers have moved into northeastern Paraguay, deforesting the countryside to plant coffee and cotton and squeezing out the existing population, including the few remaining Aché. Both the regions in the northeast and northwest are renowned for trading in contraband goods.

Controversy hit the area in 2000 when the Moonies (Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church) purchased 360, 000 hectares of the Chaco, including the entire town of Puerto Casado, for an estimated US$15 million.

Each September sees the Trans-Chaco Rally, a three-day world motor-sport competition, said to be one of the toughest on the planet.

The Chaco, Paraguay

Filadelfia

If Filadelfia were a painting, it would have been done by surrealist Salvador Dalí. This neat Mennonite community, the service and administrative center of Fernheim, resembles a suburb of Munich plonked in the middle of a red desert. Geometrically perfect homes line the streets in an orderly grid, with dusty roads and miles of Chaco wilderness extending endlessly beyond. The town lacks a real center; its soul is the giant cooperative which trades the cream of the Paraguayan crop – dairy products. Although there are indigenous day laborers from nearby pueblos, most of the town’s inhabitants are European descendants, and Guten tag is a regular greeting. It’s a captivating, if not a little strange, experience.

For information on the Mennonites, and everything from 15th-century coins and stuffed jaguars to colorful Nivaclé headdresses, visit the Unger Museum (Hindenburg s/n; admission free; 7-11:30am Mon-Fri) opposite Hotel Florida. Tours are possible in Spanish, German and English; or just get the keys from the helpful and knowledgeable owner, Sr Hartmut Wohlegemuth, at Hotel Florida.

Concepción

The addictive hustle and bustle of Paraguay’s second-most populous city, teeming with industry, port services and universities make ‘Conce’ worthy of a touchdown. While attractive it isn’t – earthquakes in 1939 and 1960 obliterated the historical buildings – downtown has pleasant plazas, pedestrian malls and guzzling nightlife, owed to the student population.