Seven reasons to visit Paraguay, South America’s unexplored wonder

[ad_1]

Explorer and botanist Aimé Bonpland, who travelled with Alexander von Humboldt, lived at Santa Maria. Not by choice; he was under house arrest as a spy, mainly because he was thought to have interests in mate production of which the Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia aka “El Supremo” did not approve.

Learn to drink yerba mate While we’re on the subject, one of the biggest contributions the Jesuits made was to the tradition of the South American cuppa – or gourd, rather. Native populations had been picking wild yerba mate leaves for centuries, but the science-loving priests worked out how to cultivate it in commercially viable quantities. Today no self-respecting southern Paraguayan leaves home without his mate kit and a huge thermos flask of tepid or cool water; cold mate, called tereré, is popular at these sultry latitudes.

The Selecta yerba factory in Bella Vista – “the capital of mate” – has a great little museum, mate-tasting bar and guided tour that tells the story of the tea as a product and cultural symbol. When the Jesuits left, they took their scientific knowhow with them. For almost a century, the industry ticked over. In 1887, anti-Semite Bernhard Förster with his wife, Elizabeth Nietzsche, established an “Aryan” community 185 miles north of Asunción, which they named Nueva Germania. The settlement was a disaster. Förster took to the bottle and killed himself with poison at the Hotel del Lago in San Bernadino. His wife returned to Germany and, finding her brother, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, suffering a mental breakdown, dedicated her life to mis-reading his work and framing it as proto-Nazi bile. Hitler attended her funeral in 1935.

A German immigrant from Nueva Germania, Friedrich Neumann, is credited with “rediscovering” the method of germinating mate and starting a new boom. The founder of Selecta, in 1942, were the Brönstrup family, also of German descent.

Paraguay has lots of connections to Germany; the Hotel Tirol in Capitan Miranda, where Mengele once stayed, used to be a “dark tourism” landmark. But it’s currently off-limits and the site is being redeveloped. The Germans were not the only ones to try racially motivated town-planning in Paraguay. White-supremacist Aussies attempted a similar experiment at Nueva Australia – now known as New London.

Visit graveyards, war museums and anti-monuments Sapucai was once the Crewe of Paraguay. Steam-powered trains between Asunción and Encarnación on the Argentinian border were maintained here from 1894 until 1999. Large sheds are littered with rusting hulks of rolling stock and machinery made in Glasgow, Halifax, Sheffield and Newport, and there’s a reconstruction of the offices. A few tumbledown houses still stand in Villa Inglesa, where the engineers lived.

In Asunción, the Ministry of Defence Museum gives the lowdown on the Triple Alliance and Chaco wars, with maps, uniforms, display cabinets of armaments, torn and bloodied flags and some shocking casualty statistics: as many as 300,000 Paraguayan soldiers are believed to have died. The nearby Recoleta cemetery is almost as grandiose as the Buenos Aires necropolis which shares its name; a key attraction the is lofty mausoleum of Madama Eliza Lynch, the Cork-born wife of president Francisco Solano López, the leader who waged war against Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.

[ad_1]

Source link : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/south-america/paraguay/why-you-should-visit-paraguay-south-america/ Author : Publish date : 2024-01-10 03:00:00 Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source .