Paraneña historical timeline

Paraguay’s history contains one of the most remarkable social experiments of the colonial era and one of the most destructive wars in modern history.

Guarani and Spanish

Asuncion was founded in 1537 and became the base for Spanish activity across the whole southern interior — Buenos Aires was resettled from here. Spanish men and Guarani women produced a largely mestizo population that kept the Guarani language.

The Jesuit missions

From 1609 the Jesuits organised Guarani communities into reducciones — some thirty towns of several thousand people each, laid out on a grid around a plaza and a stone church, self-governing under Guarani officials, exempt from the labour drafts, with their own militias that beat slave-raiding expeditions from Sao Paulo. They ran workshops, printing presses and orchestras; Guarani craftsmen carved baroque sculpture and built violins. Spain expelled the Jesuits in 1767, the missions collapsed within a generation, and the forest took them.

Independence and dictatorship

Independence from Spain in 1811, followed by decades of isolation under Doctor Francia, who closed the borders almost entirely.

The War of the Triple Alliance

Between 1864 and 1870 Paraguay fought Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay simultaneously and was destroyed. Estimates vary but the country may have lost more than half its population and the great majority of its adult men. It has never fully recovered, and the war shapes the national self-image.

The railway and the boom

Before the Triple Alliance war, Paraguay had built one of the first railways in South America, a foundry, a telegraph and a shipyard, largely with British engineers, and was unusually self-sufficient. Almost all of it was destroyed or carried off in the war, and the old Asuncion station survives with its locomotives as a monument to a trajectory that was cut off.

Twentieth century

The Chaco War, then the Stroessner dictatorship from 1954 to 1989, and democracy since.