Asunción & the East

Before the Spanish, the east was the land of the Guaraní, farming peoples who grew maize and cassava in forest clearings and lived in large communal houses. Juan de Salazar founded Asunción in August 1537 on the Paraguay river, and the town's alliance with local Guaraní chiefs, sealed by marriage, created the mestizo society that still speaks their language. For decades Asunción was the base for Spanish expansion across the south; in 1580 an expedition from it refounded Buenos Aires.

From the early seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries gathered Guaraní communities into the reductions, planned towns on both sides of the Paraná. Missions such as Trinidad, founded in 1706, and Jesús de Tavarangue grew into centres of farming, crafts and music, defended by Guaraní militias against slave raiders from Brazil. The Jesuits were expelled in 1767, and the church at Jesús was left unfinished.

After independence in 1811, the east bore the full weight of the War of the Triple Alliance. Asunción fell to Brazilian troops in January 1869; at Acosta Ñu in August 1869 boys and old men fought the allied army, a battle remembered on Paraguay's Children's Day; and Francisco Solano López was killed at Cerro Corá, in Amambay, in 1870. The 1947 civil war began with a garrison revolt in Concepción. Alfredo Stroessner, born in Encarnación, ruled from 1954 to 1989 through the Colorado Party, the army and a near-permanent state of siege, with the imprisonment, torture and disappearance of opponents; the "Archives of Terror" found at a police station near Asunción in 1992 documented the regime's repression and its part in Operation Condor. His era also opened the eastern frontier to settlers, founded the city now called Ciudad del Este in 1957 and built Itaipú with Brazil, which began generating in 1984. He was overthrown in a coup in February 1989.

The east is the heartland of Paraguay's Guaraní-speaking culture. In the countryside Guaraní is the language of home and field, while jopara, the Spanish–Guaraní mix, fills Asunción's streets and radio. Catholic devotion centres on Caacupé, whose Virgin draws pilgrims on foot from across the country each December, and the June feast of San Juan brings bonfires, walking on embers and the burning of a straw effigy.

Each craft belongs to a town: ñandutí, the spiderweb lace, to Itauguá; filigree silver jewellery and harps to Luque; pottery to Areguá and Tobatí; ao po'i embroidered cotton to Yataity in Guairá. Villarrica, founded in 1570 and moved several times before settling, calls itself the country's cultural capital.

Immigration left its mark on the south-east. Itapúa has German, Ukrainian and Japanese colonies such as Hohenau and La Paz, and since the 1970s Brazilian farmers, known as brasiguayos, have settled Alto Paraná and Canindeyú, where Portuguese is often heard. Forest peoples such as the Aché and Mbya Guaraní survive in reduced territories. Football rivalries between Asunción's Olimpia and Cerro Porteño divide families across the region.

Almost all of Paraguay's six million people live in the east. Asunción has around half a million people, and its metropolitan area, spreading into Luque, San Lorenzo, Lambaré, Fernando de la Mora and Capiatá, holds a third of the country. Ciudad del Este, with its satellites Hernandarias, Presidente Franco and Minga Guazú, is the second urban area, followed by Encarnación, Coronel Oviedo, Concepción, Pedro Juan Caballero and Villarrica.

Asunción runs on government, commerce and services; Ciudad del Este on re-exporting electronics and goods to Brazilian shoppers across the Friendship Bridge; and the countryside on soy, maize, wheat and cattle in the south-east and small farms of cassava, cotton and sesame in the older centre. Itaipú and Yacyretá, on the Paraná, provide the power.

Days start early to escape the heat, with tereré shared through the morning and a long lunch and siesta. Current issues include the concentration of land in large estates and conflicts with landless farmers, deforestation of the last Atlantic Forest, the drug-trafficking violence of the northern border, and recurring dengue.

The east's kitchen is built on cassava, maize, cheese and beef. Chipa, the cheese-and-starch bread, is associated above all with Coronel Bogado in Itapúa, and mbejú is a flat, chewy pancake of cassava starch and cheese fried on a griddle and eaten with cocido, a hot yerba mate drink. Payaguá mascada are fried patties of cassava and minced beef, and kiveve is a sweet-savoury purée of pumpkin and cheese.

The rivers supply surubí and other catfish, served as pira caldo, a rich fish soup, or fried in the towns along the Paraguay and Paraná. Asado is the weekend gathering, often with mandioca and chipa guasu on the side, and mbaipy is a maize porridge eaten with meat.

Tereré is drunk with pohã ñana, medicinal herbs pounded into the water by vendors in Asunción's markets, a practice recognised by UNESCO as intangible heritage. Caña, sugarcane spirit, is the local liquor, and sweets include dulce de guayaba and kosereva, a candied bitter-orange peel cooked with molasses. Areguá celebrates its strawberries each winter.

Asunción's centre stretches along the bay of the Paraguay river: the Panteón de los Héroes, the pink Palacio de los López, the old Cabildo, the cathedral and the Manzana de la Rivera cluster of restored houses, with the Costanera waterfront and the sprawl of Mercado 4 a short ride away.

East of the capital, the Circuito de Oro takes in Areguá on Lake Ypacaraí, the German-founded resort of San Bernardino, the basilica at Caacupé, the Franciscan church at Yaguarón with its painted wooden interior, the lace-makers of Itauguá and the battlefield town of Piribebuy. South of Asunción, Ybycuí National Park protects forested hills, streams and waterfalls, with the ruins of the La Rosada iron foundry, destroyed during the Triple Alliance war.

In the south, the Jesuit missions of Trinidad and Jesús stand near Encarnación, with the reductions of San Cosme y Damián and the mission museums of San Ignacio in Misiones nearby. Encarnación has river beaches along the Paraná, and the war ruins of Humaitá lie in Ñeembucú. In the far east, Ciudad del Este gives access to the Itaipú dam and to the Saltos del Monday waterfall, while in the north-east the Mbaracayú reserve protects Atlantic Forest, and the river port of Concepción and Cerro Corá National Park lie towards the Brazilian border.