Paraguay
Discover Paraguay
Introduction
Paraguay sits in the middle of South America and is one of its only two landlocked countries, the other being Bolivia. It covers about 406,750 square kilometres — roughly sixth largest on the continent — and holds around 6.1 million people.
The Paraguay River splits it in two, north to south, and the two halves have almost nothing in common. East of the river is green, rolling, farmed and where nearly everyone lives. West of it is the Gran Chaco: a vast, flat, thorn-scrub plain that takes up 60% of the country and holds under 3% of its people.
What makes Paraguay genuinely unlike anywhere else in the Americas is its language. Guaraní is co-official with Spanish and is spoken by the large majority of Paraguayans — not only by indigenous communities but across the whole population. Nowhere else in the hemisphere is an indigenous language the everyday speech of most of the country.
The colonial chapter that left the deepest mark was the Jesuit reductions: mission towns run with the Guaraní between 1609 and the Jesuits' expulsion in 1767, two of whose ruins near Encarnación are a UNESCO World Heritage site.