Paraguay

Capital: Asunción. Official languages: Spanish and Guaraní, one of the few countries where an Indigenous language holds equal official status and everyday use. Currency: the guaraní. Paraguay fought the devastating War of the Triple Alliance in the 1860s and later rebuilt itself as a republic.

Fun Facts

• Paraguay and Bolivia are the only two landlocked countries in South America.
• Guaraní is spoken by most Paraguayans, not only Indigenous communities, a rare case of a colonial-era country adopting an Indigenous language as a shared national tongue.
• The Itaipu Dam, built with Brazil on the Paraná River, is one of the largest hydroelectric plants in the world by annual generation.
• Tereré, a cold version of yerba mate, is Paraguay's national drink and was named a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2020.
• Paraguay is one of the world's leading producers of yerba mate and soybeans.

Paraguay rewards travelers willing to go off the usual circuit. Asunción's riverside streets mix colonial buildings with a growing arts scene, while the Jesuit mission ruins of Trinidad and Jesús, both UNESCO World Heritage Sites, recall a remarkable seventeenth century experiment in shared life between Guaraní communities and Jesuit priests. Further out, the wetlands of the Pantanal and the Chaco offer some of South America's best wildlife watching, and small towns still gather each afternoon over a shared gourd of tereré.