Discover Chaco

The Chaco is the western sixty per cent of Paraguay and holds under three per cent of its people. It is a flat expanse of thorn scrub, palm savannah and seasonal wetland, hot enough that summer temperatures above forty-five degrees are routine, and it was called the green hell by the soldiers who fought the Chaco War across it in the 1930s.

The road that crosses it, the Ruta Transchaco, runs for hundreds of kilometres through very little, and the settlements along it are unlike anything else in South America. Filadelfia and Loma Plata are Mennonite colonies, founded in the 1920s and 1930s by German-speaking settlers who were offered land nobody else wanted; they built dairy and beef industries that now supply much of the country, and Plautdietsch is still spoken there.

Indigenous peoples — Nivaclé, Enlhet, Ayoreo and others — live across the region, and some Ayoreo groups remain uncontacted, the last such people in South America outside the Amazon. The wildlife is the reason naturalists come: jaguar, puma, tapir, giant anteater and the Chacoan peccary, a species known only from fossils until living animals were found here in 1975. Defensores del Chaco is the largest national park in the country. Deforestation for cattle is running at among the fastest rates anywhere on earth.