Paraguay Discovery Guide

Paraguay is the South American country almost nobody puts on an itinerary, which is most of the reason to go. There is no queue at the Jesuit ruins and no backpacker circuit to join.

What it offers is a country still being itself rather than performing for visitors — a bilingual culture with a real indigenous language at its centre, an afternoon ritual of shared cold mate that structures the whole day, and the Chaco, one of the last genuinely wild large landscapes on the continent.

It is also the cheapest country in South America by a clear margin.

The friction is that little is set up for tourists. Signage, English and organised tours are all thin, distances in the Chaco are long and the roads unpaved, and the summer heat between December and February is punishing. Come in winter, bring some Spanish, and treat the lack of infrastructure as the price of the quiet.

If you travel slowly

Base in Encarnación for a week — river beaches, a serious Carnival in January and February, and the Jesuit ruins at Trinidad and Jesús within an hour. Add the hill towns around Villarrica and the craft villages of the Circuito de Oro.

If you want to see the essentials

A week: Asunción for two days, the Jesuit missions for two, and the craft towns — Itauguá for ñandutí lace, Areguá for ceramics, Luque for silver filigree and harps — for the rest.

If you seek local character

Sit down with a guampa of tereré in any plaza in the late afternoon. The Mercado 4 in Asunción for food. And a village festival, where the harp and the polca paraguaya are played live rather than for tourists.

If you want to go beyond the obvious

The Chaco: the Ruta Transchaco north to the Mennonite colonies at Filadelfia and Loma Plata — German-speaking farming towns founded in the 1920s in the middle of a thorn desert — and beyond them to Defensores del Chaco, which holds jaguar, giant anteater and giant armadillo. Further north, Bahía Negra reaches the Paraguayan edge of the Pantanal.

Paraguay is the only country in the Americas where an Indigenous language is spoken by the majority of the population, and that fact shapes everything else.

Guaraní as a national language

Guaraní is co-official and spoken by most Paraguayans, including those of European descent. Daily speech mixes it with Spanish so thoroughly that the blend has its own name, jopara.

Tereré

Cold mate drunk from a shared guampa is close to a national ritual, taken in groups through the heat of the day, and the sharing is the point rather than the drink.

The Jesuit missions

The reductions at Trinidad and Jesús are UNESCO-listed ruins of a seventeenth-century experiment in which Guaraní communities lived under Jesuit administration — a contested history that Paraguayans discuss with mixed feelings.

Ñandutí lace

The spiderweb lace of Itaúgua is the best-known craft, hand-made and named from the Guaraní for spider web.

• Chaco
• Paraneña

The Chaco is being cleared faster than almost any forest on earth, mostly for cattle. Choosing Chaco operators and lodges that work with conservation organisations, rather than ranches that cleared the land, is the meaningful choice available to a visitor here.

Part of the Paraguayan Chaco is home to uncontacted Ayoreo groups — among the last people living in voluntary isolation outside Amazonia. Their territory is not somewhere to travel independently, and no legitimate tour goes looking for them. Use guides who know where the boundaries are and respect them.

Buy crafts from the makers. Ñandutí in Itauguá, ao po'i in Yataity, ceramics in Areguá and silver in Luque are all made in the towns they are sold in, and buying at source rather than from an Asunción gift shop is straightforward and cheap.

At the Jesuit missions, stay off the stonework. These are lightly supervised compared to more visited sites, which is a reason to be more careful rather than less.

Learning a few words of Guaraní is not a gimmick here. It is the language of the country and the single most appreciated thing a visitor can do.

May to September is the comfortable half of the year and the time to come — mild days, cool nights, and the Chaco actually bearable. June to August is the sweet spot, though a surazo, a cold southerly, can drop temperatures sharply for a few days, so bring something warm.

December to February is severe. Asunción sits in the mid to high 30s with heavy humidity, and the Chaco regularly passes 45°C — the hottest temperatures recorded anywhere in South America. Everything shuts in the early afternoon and it is not a good time to travel.

March, April, October and November are workable shoulders: hot but not extreme, and the rains in October and November green everything up.

Two things to time for: Encarnación's Carnival, on weekends through January and February, which is the biggest in the country; and Semana Santa, when families make chipa together and the whole country eats it for a week.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Year-round relative cost index vs country average