Thai hotel owner-operator Minor Hotels is to enter a new country market — Paraguay.
It is to open an 80-room NH Collection hotel in capital Asunción, close to the Avenida Aviadores del Chaco.
According to a press release from Minor, the hotel will be part of a 70-floor building that will be the tallest structure in Asunción and Paraguay and the fourth tallest in South America when it is finished in 2029.
I hope this is not being done just for the sake of it being tall, and I assume if that was the overriding goal, the developers would have made it the largest in the continent.
A glance at Hotel News Now shows that Paraguay has never been mentioned in its pages, save for the odd piece of news from the country about a new hotel opening, such as Wyndham Hotel Group opening the 206-room Esplendor Asunción in 2016.
That Paraguay is almost invisible from our pages is apt for a country that is the only country in the massive continent of South America that has an indigenous language as its official language.
Paraguayan soccer players in international matches speak Guarani to one another, not Spanish, which they are bilingual in, so the opposition players cannot understand them or understand only a little of what they are saying.
The Paraguayan region of the Chaco, part of the name of the street close to the upcoming NH Collection, is one the least inhabited places in the continent, too. It is empty, wild and mysterious, and myths abound that it is impossible to cross. Deforestation is a problem there, perhaps in part due to soybean production, one of the country’s major industries.
Up until this century, the country was less fortunately known for its brisk trade in counterfeit products.
It is also where several high-profile Nazi leaders allegedly fled at the end of World War II, not to be heard of for decades.
Paraguay in the 19th century undertook one of the most disastrous political squabbles imaginable when it decided to go to war against not only Uruguay and Argentina, but also Brazil. This half-decade or more war, known as the War of the Triple Alliance, undermined the country, with history stating it lost from 30% to 90% of its male population, or two-thirds of its entire population.
No one was counting, I guess.
The country at the time was run — if that is the right word — by Francisco Solano López and his partner and/or wife Eliza Alice Lynch, who was born in Ireland and had a life as colorful and controversial as many aspects of Paraguay’s history, and a lot of her biography is also shrouded in myth and propaganda.
I read all of this in the wonderful, fascinating travel journal of John Gimlette titled: “At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels through Paraguay,” published in 2003.
A third of the country’s population of six million live in Asunción.
Today, energy and automotive parts are big money-makers for a nation now part of the global economy.
A couple of years after publication of Gimlette’s book, I was traveling in northern Argentina, across the also desolate and stunningly beautiful Esteros del Iberá, a seasonal wetland that stretches for almost 8,000 square miles.
I successfully searched for a rare bird called the strange-tailed tyrant (Alectrurus risora), which if I was to describe I would say it looks like a sparrow with an eagle feather stuck into its rump. It is endemic to this part of Argentina and a small part of southern Paraguay. In total, there are probably no more than 15,000 of them.
Iberá’s northern section ends to the northwest at the small city of Corrientes, where British writer Graham Greene set his 1973 novel “The Honorary Consul.”
Its northern region ends at the smaller city of Pousadas, and it is from there I could see Paraguay across the Paraná.
I did consider popping over, but I could do so only on a bus, and I was told the waiting time to get across and back is inestimable, and what awaited me on the other side — what I could reasonably do in a day — was not at all special.
In Posadas, I stayed at a very humble hotel called the Residenciales Misiones, which had a crumbling inner courtyard with a white-and-brown cat and a main room and entrance area dark and full of bric-a-brac, Victoria-era photos of nonsmiling people, calmly ticking grandfather clocks and a small piano. Piles of books sat on two tables.
It took me a minute adjusting my eyesight to the poor light and looking around before I saw squashed into a corner on a low chair, slumped, a man — alive — wearing a creased off-white suit and Panama hat.
He appeared to come from a century before.
“I am going via boat to the Amazon,” he said, and he added he had been traveling since 1991.
The Paraná flows into Brazil and Paraguay, but I was not sure there would be a complete river system that reached all the way to a major tributary of South America’s largest and longest river in northern Brazil.
This appeared not to deter the man.
He was Swiss, he told me. He went home only once a year to attend a meeting with lawyers and receive funds, which sustained his perambulations. He arrived every year to South America by a slow boat across the Atlantic Ocean to Argentina’s River Plate, and then he worked his way north up the Paraná to Corrientes and eventually to Posadas.
The way he told this made it sound as though year after year after year he never got any farther.
He might still be there, another mysterious element to this continent of many lost souls. I hope he is still out there.
The city on the other side of the Paraná, Encarnación, has in the years since I was near it become a tourism destination for Paraguayans and those living in bordering regions, so I read.
Still, I am waiting to get to Paraguay, as maybe the Swiss adventurer is waiting to get to the Amazon.
All of that may or may not be in the NH Collection Asunción’s welcome kit, but I am sure there is just as many excellent and rich tales to be learned when staying there.
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