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Capital: Asunción
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Having failed several times to establish a permanent settlement on the site of Buenos Aires, the Spaniards settled Asunción in 1537 where the agrarian Huarpe and Guarani Indians were more friendly than the hostile Puelche of the coast. In spite of that early start, Buenos Aires took the lead thanks to its strategic position as soon as the Indian threat was reduced by disease and warfare. Asunción was a backwater when the Buenos Aires merchants declared independence in 1810 but when they tried to extend their power they were opposed by the caudillo Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia who, calling himself "El Supremo", declared Paraguay's independence and led it in complete isolation until 1840. Paraguay's trials in the hands of megalomaniac leaders were not over for two decades later Fransisco Solano López led the country into a catastrophic war against Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay that caused the death of three quarters of its population and the loss of half of its territory in 1870. Paraguay's fortunes had a turn for the better in the Chaco War in which they gained a vast expanse of semi desert from Bolivia in 1935 but that was followed by political disorder and dictatorships until General Alfredo Stroesser took control in 1954 and held on to it until 1989. |
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From Montevideo, an overnight bus took nine hours to bring me to Buenos Aires. I spent the day in town and took another overnight bus that got here at noon after an 18 hour drive.
Asunción has a population of over a million but its old city center is not very large so I had time to see most it before turning in early. This is the Cathedral in front of Plaza de Independencia.
The presidential palace is well guarded and I had to ask permission to take this picture. The gardens behind it face the Rio Paraguay which flows into the Paraná. I would have liked to take pictures from there but they would not let me in!
I found a nearby street that reached the riverfront and and took this partial view of Asunción harbour. The Paraguay and Paraná rivers are navigable and they constitute an important vector for Paraguay's trade with Brazil and Argentina.
Instead of going directly to Ciudad del Este, I made a detour south through Encarnación to see the ruins of the famous missions the Jesuits built here in the 17th century.
In this area, Jesuits distinguished themselves from the rest of the Catholic clergy who supported the established powers (first the Spanish and then the Criollo), and condoned the harsh treatment meted to the indigenous people by the big landowners (the church somehow becoming the largest one of them in the process).
Starting early in the 17th-century Jesuit missionaries began to educate and civilise some primitive amerindians they had induced to leave the forest to settle in the theocratic communes (called "reductiones") initially established further north. Their social experiment was highly successful and their native wards proved capable of adapting to civilised ways and of learning the skills and arts required to build magnificent churches and comfortable towns like Trinidad, some remains of which are shown below.
Unfortunately, decent treatment of Indians was contrary the trend of the times which was to exterminate them in Argentina and Uruguay or to capture them for forced labour in Brazil. The Jesuits moved to their missions to the interior in the south to escape the slave hunting "Bandeirantes" from Sao Paulo. They even armed and trained the Indians to defend themselves but the Bandeirantes could not be stopped for they had the support of the civil authorities who in the end, caused the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1759.
After Encarnación, I visited Ciudad del Este and crossed the "Friendship Bridge" over the Paraná on foot on my way to Foz do Iguaçu in Bazil.
