Paraguay and Uruguay

TL;DR. Paraguay and Uruguay are the two smaller nations of the Southern Cone, both wedged between the regional giants Argentina and Brazil, both landlocked or nearly so, and both drinking mate tea as a matter of daily habit rather than occasional taste. They are paired in this chapter because their histories are tangled together from the start, most of all by the War of the Triple Alliance (1864 to 1870), in which Paraguay fought Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay together and suffered one of the worst death tolls, relative to its population, of any war in modern history. Beyond that shared trauma, their paths split hard in the 20th century. Paraguay lived under one of Latin America's longest dictatorships, that of Alfredo Stroessner, and only became a full democracy in 1989. Uruguay built an early welfare state, earned a reputation as the "Switzerland of South America," survived its own military dictatorship, and returned to become one of the region's most stable, secular, and socially liberal countries, home to a former guerrilla turned globally admired president, Jose "Pepe" Mujica. Both were founding members of Mercosur, the regional trade bloc, and both remain smaller neighbors living, in different ways, in the shadow of their two large neighbors.

Key takeaways

• Both countries began as buffer zones between competing empires and later between competing regional powers, a geographic fact that has shaped their politics for two centuries.
• The War of the Triple Alliance (1864 to 1870) devastated Paraguay, killing by some estimates a majority of its adult male population, and remains the central trauma of Paraguayan national memory.
• Uruguay took a strikingly different 20th century path: an early, progressive welfare state under Jose Batlle y Ordonez, then decades of comparative stability broken by a military dictatorship (1973 to 1985), then a return to being one of Latin America's most stable and socially liberal democracies.
• Paraguay lived under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner from 1954 to 1989, one of the longest in Latin American history, and the country also, uncomfortably, became a postwar refuge for fugitive Nazi war criminals.
• Jose "Pepe" Mujica, a former Uruguayan guerrilla, served as president from 2010 to 2015, became known worldwide as "the world's poorest president" for his simple lifestyle, and signed the 2013 law making Uruguay the first country on Earth to fully legalize and regulate recreational cannabis nationwide. He died in 2025, mourned across the political spectrum.
• Paraguay is one of the few countries in the Americas where an indigenous language, Guarani, is spoken by most of the population and is co-official alongside Spanish.

Main events at a glance

The land and the deep past

Paraguay and Uruguay both sit in the part of South America called the Southern Cone, the tapering southern end of the continent, and both occupy a position that has mattered more to their history than almost anything else: they are the small countries caught between the two large ones. Paraguay is landlocked, boxed in by Argentina to the south and west and Brazil to the east, and reaches the sea only indirectly, by river traffic down the Parana and Paraguay rivers through Argentina. Uruguay sits on the Atlantic coast, but squeezed into a narrow strip between Argentina, across the wide estuary of the Rio de la Plata, and Brazil to the north. Both nations' histories are, in large part, the story of trying to survive as small states next to two much larger and often rival neighbors, Argentina and Brazil.

Before Europeans arrived, the land that became Paraguay was home to the Guarani, an indigenous people who farmed, fished, and lived in settled communities across the forests and grasslands of the region. The land that became Uruguay, by contrast, supported smaller, more mobile groups such as the Charrua, who lived by hunting and gathering across its grassy plains and left a much lighter demographic footprint on what followed. This difference mattered: Paraguay's colonial history became deeply entangled with the Guarani in a way that Uruguay's did not with the Charrua, whose population was decimated by disease, war, and forced assimilation in the colonial and early independence periods.

Spanish colonization of Paraguay took a distinctive form starting in the 1600s: Jesuit missionaries, priests belonging to the Society of Jesus, a Catholic religious order, set up self-governing mission towns called reducciones (from a Spanish word meaning roughly "settlements" or "reductions," in the sense of gathering scattered people into organized communities). These reducciones brought together tens of thousands of Guarani people into towns built around a church, taught them European farming methods, music, and craftsmanship, and, notably, kept the Guarani language alive as the language of daily instruction and record-keeping rather than replacing it with Spanish. The reducciones also armed and trained Guarani militias, who fought off slave raids by Portuguese slavers from Brazil, called bandeirantes. This unusual experiment ended in 1767, when the Spanish crown expelled the Jesuits from all its territories, partly out of fear that the order had grown too independent and powerful. The ruins of these missions, particularly in what is now southern Paraguay, are UNESCO World Heritage sites today, and the experiment became known to a much wider audience through the 1986 film The Mission, a dramatization (with real historical liberties) of a Jesuit mission's resistance to being handed over to Portuguese control.

Uruguay's deep past took a different shape again. Because it sat exactly on the seam between the Spanish and Portuguese empires in South America, the land known as the Banda Oriental (meaning "the eastern bank," referring to its position on the eastern side of the Uruguay River) was fought over repeatedly by the two colonial powers through the 1700s, changing hands and hosting rival forts and settlements. Montevideo, Uruguay's future capital, was founded by Spain in 1724 partly as a military outpost to block Portuguese expansion. Neither empire ever fully secured the territory, and that unresolved contest set the stage for what came after independence: rather than falling cleanly to one successor state, Uruguay became, in 1828, an independent buffer country, deliberately kept out of both Argentine and Brazilian hands with British diplomatic help, since Britain had a commercial interest in a stable, neutral port controlling the mouth of the Rio de la Plata rather than seeing it fall under the control of either larger rival.

Don't be confused: the Banda Oriental, Uruguay, and the wider Rio de la Plata region are not the same thing. The Banda Oriental was the old colonial name for the territory that later became Uruguay. The Rio de la Plata (River Plate) is the vast estuary where the Parana and Uruguay rivers meet the Atlantic Ocean, with Buenos Aires, Argentina's capital, on its southwestern shore and Montevideo, Uruguay's capital, on its northeastern shore. "Rioplatense" is often used as an adjective for the shared culture and Spanish dialect of the whole region around that estuary, spanning both Argentina and Uruguay, so it is broader than either country alone.

How modern Paraguay and Uruguay were formed

Paraguay

Paraguay declared independence from Spain in 1811, early even by the standards of a continent that broke from Spanish rule mostly in the 1810s and 1820s. What followed was unusual: rather than joining the wider wars of independence led by figures like Simon Bolivar and Jose de San Martin, Paraguay turned inward under a lawyer named Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, who took power in the new republic and by 1814 had made himself dictator, a position he formalized for life in 1816. Francia, popularly known as "El Supremo" (the Supreme One), ruled Paraguay until his death in 1840 by sealing the country off almost entirely from the outside world: he restricted trade, closed the borders to travelers, banned Paraguayans from leaving without permission, and built a rigidly controlled, self-sufficient state with no free press and no tolerated opposition. His motives were partly defensive, since he feared Paraguay would be swallowed by its larger neighbors or destabilized by outside intrigue, and by the isolationist measure he largely succeeded in keeping Paraguay independent and orderly during his lifetime, though at the cost of personal liberty and any real political pluralism.

Francia's successors continued a strong, centralized, state-directed style of government, most notably Carlos Antonio Lopez, who ruled from 1841 to 1862 and cautiously reopened the country to trade and modernization while still keeping tight personal control. His son, Francisco Solano Lopez, inherited power in 1862 and proved far more reckless. Solano Lopez built up Paraguay's army, styled himself as a regional power broker, and in 1864 involved Paraguay in a border and diplomatic dispute that spiraled into the War of the Triple Alliance, described in the next section. That war, and the catastrophic way Solano Lopez pursued it even as defeat became obvious, is remembered in Paraguay today as the country's defining national tragedy.

Uruguay

Uruguay's road to statehood ran through decades of contested control. After Spanish rule collapsed in the early 1800s, the Banda Oriental was fought over by Argentina (then organizing itself as the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata) and by Brazil (first as a Portuguese colony, then as an independent empire after 1822), each of which wanted the territory for itself. A Uruguayan independence movement, led by the folk hero Jose Gervasio Artigas, fought for autonomy from both, and though Artigas was eventually defeated and forced into exile, he is remembered today as the founding father of Uruguayan nationhood. The decisive turn came in the 1820s, when a group of Uruguayan patriots known as the Thirty-Three Orientals crossed back into the territory to renew the fight for independence, triggering a war between Argentina and Brazil that neither could clearly win. Britain, keen to keep the mouth of the Rio de la Plata out of the hands of either rival power, brokered a settlement, and in 1828 Uruguay was recognized as an independent state, deliberately built as a buffer between its two much larger neighbors.

Uruguay's 19th century after independence was turbulent, marked by civil wars between two rival political parties, the Colorados and the Blancos, whose rivalry shaped Uruguayan politics for generations. Stability and genuine reform arrived at the turn of the 20th century under Jose Batlle y Ordonez, a Colorado leader who served two terms as president (1903 to 1907 and 1911 to 1915) and whose influence on Uruguayan institutions lasted long after he left office. Batlle y Ordonez built what was, for its time and place, a remarkably progressive state: an eight-hour workday, pensions, protections for workers, expanded public education, and a formal separation of church and state that removed religious references from public institutions and even, at one point, renamed Christmas as "Family Day" and Easter Week as "Tourism Week" in the official calendar. This program gave Uruguay a lasting reputation, still repeated today, as the "Switzerland of South America," a small, orderly, socially advanced country standing apart from the instability that troubled many of its neighbors.

Big events and conflicts

Paraguay

The War of the Triple Alliance (1864 to 1870) is the single most important event in Paraguayan history. It began from a tangle of regional disputes and Francisco Solano Lopez's ambitions to act as a power broker in the region, and it escalated into a war of Paraguay against the combined forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, allied under a treaty that gave the war its name. The war ran for nearly six years and turned into a war of attrition and eventual annihilation for Paraguay: Solano Lopez refused to accept defeat even as his armies collapsed, conscripting boys and old men as adult male casualties mounted. He was killed in 1870 in a final battle, ending the war. The human cost was staggering: historians differ on exact numbers, but many estimates hold that Paraguay lost a majority of its adult male population and a very large share of its total population to combat, disease, and starvation, one of the most disproportionate death tolls of any war in the modern era. Paraguay also lost significant territory to Brazil and Argentina in the peace settlement. The war left the country impoverished, its population skewed heavily female for a generation, and its economy set back for decades. It is taught in Paraguayan schools today as a story of national sacrifice and resistance to a much larger coalition, and monuments and memorials to it are common across the country.

Paraguay fought a second major war six decades later, the Chaco War (1932 to 1935), against Bolivia. Both countries claimed the Gran Chaco, a vast, hot, thinly populated lowland region, partly because Bolivia (landlocked after losing its Pacific coast to Chile, a story told in Bolivia and Ecuador) hoped the region held oil reserves and wanted a route to the sea via the Paraguay River. The war was brutal, fought in difficult terrain and extreme heat, and cost both sides tens of thousands of lives, but Paraguay ultimately won, securing most of the disputed territory. Unlike the Triple Alliance war, the Chaco War is remembered in Paraguay as a hard-won national victory rather than a tragedy.

The mid-20th century brought Paraguay's other defining era: the dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner, who seized power in a coup in 1954 and ruled until 1989, one of the longest presidencies in Latin American history. Stroessner's rule was authoritarian and repressive, relying on a permanent state of emergency, a loyal military and single-party political machine, and the jailing, torture, or exile of opponents. In an uncomfortable chapter of this period, Paraguay under Stroessner also became a known haven for fugitive Nazi war criminals fleeing prosecution after the Second World War, most notoriously Josef Mengele, the former Auschwitz doctor responsible for horrific medical experiments on prisoners, who lived under Stroessner-era protection and evaded capture in the region for years before his death in Brazil in 1979. Stroessner was finally overthrown in a 1989 coup led by one of his own generals, and Paraguay began a gradual, often bumpy transition to democratic government that continues to shape its politics today.

Two threads of modern Paraguayan identity deserve separate mention. First, the Guarani language has survived and thrived to a degree almost unmatched among indigenous languages in the Americas: a large majority of Paraguayans speak Guarani, and it has been a co-official language alongside Spanish since the 1992 constitution, used in media, government, and everyday conversation across social classes, not confined to indigenous communities alone. Second, Paraguay shares with Brazil the Itaipu Dam, one of the largest hydroelectric power plants in the world by generating capacity, built jointly by the two countries on the Parana River and completed in stages starting in the 1980s. Itaipu generates far more electricity than small Paraguay needs, and the revenue from selling the surplus, mostly to Brazil, is a significant part of the Paraguayan economy. Paraguay operates a second, smaller joint dam, Yacyreta, with Argentina.

Uruguay

Uruguay's 20th century calm gave way to serious turbulence starting in the 1960s. Economic stagnation and social discontent fed the rise of the Tupamaros, formally the Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional-Tupamaros, a leftist urban guerrilla group that carried out bank robberies, kidnappings of officials and businessmen, and other armed actions through the 1960s and into the early 1970s, presenting itself as a revolutionary alternative to a political system it saw as failing ordinary Uruguayans. The government's crackdown on the Tupamaros, combined with broader economic and political crisis, opened the door to military intervention: in 1973 Uruguay's armed forces, working with an already-authoritarian civilian president, dissolved the legislature and took direct control of the country, ruling as a military dictatorship until 1985. Like other dictatorships of the era in the region (including neighboring Argentina's, covered in Argentina), the Uruguayan military government imprisoned and tortured thousands of suspected dissidents, and Uruguay gained the grim distinction of having, for a time, one of the highest numbers of political prisoners per capita in the world.

Democracy returned in 1985, and Uruguay spent the following decades rebuilding a reputation for exactly the qualities Batlle y Ordonez had once given it: stability, low corruption, and strong institutions. By numerous international rankings and comparisons, Uruguay is regularly counted among the least corrupt and most democratic countries not just in Latin America but worldwide, a genuinely unusual standing for a country of only around 3.4 million people in a region often associated with instability.

The most internationally famous chapter of this recent era is the presidency of Jose "Pepe" Mujica, who served from 2010 to 2015. Mujica had been a Tupamaros guerrilla in his youth, was captured and imprisoned for roughly 14 years under the military dictatorship, including long stretches in harsh isolation, and emerged from prison to build a political career within Uruguay's restored democracy rather than outside it. As president, Mujica became known worldwide as "the world's poorest president" because he donated the great majority of his official salary to charity and social programs and continued to live simply on his small farm outside Montevideo rather than moving into the presidential residence, driving an old Volkswagen Beetle rather than an official car. His government's most consequential and internationally watched achievement was a 2013 law making Uruguay the first country in the world to fully legalize and regulate the production, sale, and use of recreational cannabis nationwide, a policy aimed explicitly at undercutting illegal drug trafficking by bringing the market under state control rather than simply tolerating private use. Mujica's presidency also sat within a broader run of socially progressive legislation in Uruguay in these years, including the legalization of abortion in 2012 and of same-sex marriage in 2013, both passed with comparatively little of the sustained political conflict such measures generated elsewhere in the region. Mujica died in 2025, and tributes poured in from across Uruguay's political spectrum and from admirers worldwide, testament to how far his personal reputation for modesty and conviction had traveled beyond Uruguay's borders.

How people lived: daily life and lifestyle

Mate (pronounced MAH-teh) is, if anything, even more central to daily identity in Paraguay and Uruguay than in Argentina, where it is already a defining ritual, described further in Argentina. Uruguayans are frequently cited as the world's heaviest consumers of yerba mate per person, and it is entirely normal to see people walking down the street, riding a bus, or sitting at a desk with a mate gourd in one hand and a thermos of hot water tucked under the other arm, refilling their own cup rather than waiting for a shared round. Paraguay adds its own regional twist: in the country's hot climate, mate is often drunk cold, with cold water or fruit juice instead of hot water, a version called terere, which functions as both a refreshment and the same kind of social glue as hot mate elsewhere.

Both countries also share the gaucho, the cowboy of the South American grasslands, as a cultural touchstone. The wide, flat pastureland stretching across Uruguay and into Argentina, called the pampas, historically supported cattle ranching on a huge scale, and the gaucho, skilled on horseback, independent, and traditionally dressed in loose trousers, a wide-brimmed hat, and a knife tucked into a wide belt, became a folk symbol of Uruguayan and Argentine national identity, celebrated in poetry, music, and museums even as the working ranch culture that produced the figure has become a smaller part of the modern economy.

Paraguay's daily life carries its own distinct feature: genuine, widespread bilingualism between Spanish and Guarani. Many Paraguayans grow up speaking both languages, but the roles are often reversed from what an outsider might expect: Spanish tends to be the language of school, government, and formal writing, while Guarani is frequently the more intimate, informal language of the home, of jokes, of affection, and of speaking with grandparents, even among people who are entirely fluent and comfortable in Spanish for public life. Mixing the two in the same conversation, a blend sometimes called Jopara, is common and unremarkable in everyday speech.

Music and the arts

Paraguay's best-known musical export is Paraguayan harp music, played on a distinctive Paraguayan harp, smaller and higher-strung than the concert harp familiar in Europe and North America, typically accompanied by guitar. The style, lively and rippling, grew out of the harp and guitar traditions Jesuit missionaries brought to the Guarani missions centuries ago and later fused with local folk melodies; the best-known piece is probably "Pajaro Campana" ("Bell Bird"), whose fast, chiming runs are meant to imitate a bird call.

Uruguay has its own strong claim, alongside Argentina, to the origins of tango, the passionate, melancholic partner dance and music style usually associated most with Buenos Aires. Tango in fact developed on both sides of the Rio de la Plata in the late 1800s, in the working-class neighborhoods of both Montevideo and Buenos Aires, and Uruguay produced some of the genre's most important figures, including the composer Gerardo Matos Rodriguez, who wrote the famous tango "La Cumparsita" in Montevideo in 1916.

Uruguay's other major musical tradition is candombe, a drumming and dance style with roots in the enslaved African population brought to Montevideo during the colonial period. Candombe is built around three drums of different sizes and pitches, called tambores, played in processions through the streets, especially during Carnival, accompanied by dancing and call-and-response singing. It is recognized by UNESCO as part of the world's intangible cultural heritage and remains a living tradition centered in specific historically Afro-Uruguayan neighborhoods of Montevideo, most famously Barrio Sur and Palermo.

Don't be confused: candombe and tango are not the same tradition. Tango grew primarily out of European immigrant communities (Italian and Spanish) and their encounter with local Rioplatense culture, and its instruments are typically the bandoneon (a type of accordion), violin, piano, and guitar. Candombe grew out of Afro-Uruguayan communities and is built entirely around drumming, without melodic instruments at its core. The two traditions did influence each other over the decades, particularly in early tango's use of some rhythms with African roots, but they remain musically and culturally distinct.

Notable people

• Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, Paraguay's first ruler after independence, whose extreme isolationism kept the young country intact but also cut it off from the world for a generation.
• Francisco Solano Lopez, the Paraguayan leader whose decisions led the country into the War of the Triple Alliance, the defining catastrophe of Paraguayan history.
• Jose Batlle y Ordonez, the Uruguayan president whose early-1900s reforms built an enduring welfare state and secular political culture.
• Jose "Pepe" Mujica, former guerrilla and president of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015, internationally known for his modest lifestyle and for landmark cannabis and social legislation.
• Alfredo Stroessner, the general whose 1954 to 1989 dictatorship is Paraguay's other defining modern era, remembered for repression as well as for the country's uncomfortable postwar role as a haven for Nazi fugitives.
• Luis Suarez and Diego Forlan, among Uruguay's most celebrated footballers, representing a national sport in which tiny Uruguay (population around 3.4 million) has an outsized record, having won the first-ever World Cup in 1930 as host, and again in 1950.

Religion, coexistence, and minorities

Paraguay remains, in cultural and linguistic terms, one of the more visibly indigenous-influenced countries in South America, not because a large share of the population identifies as indigenous today (that share is a small minority, well under 5 percent, concentrated among distinct peoples such as the Guarani, Ache, and others), but because the Guarani language and many Guarani-derived customs and foods are woven into mainstream Paraguayan culture rather than confined to indigenous communities. Roman Catholicism remains the majority religion, brought by Spanish colonization and the Jesuit missions, though evangelical Protestant churches have grown in recent decades, as they have across much of Latin America.

Uruguay stands out from nearly every other country in the region for its secularism. The formal separation of church and state that Batlle y Ordonez pushed through in the early 1900s has left a lasting cultural mark: surveys consistently find Uruguay among the least religious countries in Latin America, with large shares of the population identifying as non-religious or agnostic, and religious observance carrying far less social weight in public life than in most of its Catholic-majority neighbors. This helps explain why socially liberal legislation, on abortion, same-sex marriage, and cannabis, faced comparatively less organized religious opposition in Uruguay than similar proposals often do elsewhere in the region.

Food: Paraguay and Uruguay's own tables

Paraguay

Paraguayan food centers on corn and cassava (also called manioc or yuca), staple crops inherited from Guarani agriculture. The signature dish is sopa paraguaya, whose name means "Paraguayan soup" despite being, confusingly, a dense, savory cornbread made with corn flour, cheese, onion, and eggs rather than anything liquid; the most common explanation for the name is that it began as a looser corn porridge that thickened into a baked dish over time while keeping its old name. Alongside it, chipa is a small, chewy bread roll made from cassava starch and cheese, traditionally baked in clay ovens and associated especially with Easter Week, though sold and eaten year-round as a common snack.

Don't be confused: sopa paraguaya is not soup. Despite its name, it is a firm, sliceable cornbread, closer in texture to a dense quiche or cornbread casserole than to any kind of soup. Visitors expecting a bowl of broth are reliably surprised.

Uruguay

Uruguayan food shares deep roots with Argentina's, above all in the asado, a slow-cooked barbecue of beef and other meats grilled over wood or charcoal, treated as a social event as much as a meal, typically stretched out over hours with family and friends. Uruguay's own signature contribution to the region's food culture is the chivito, a hefty sandwich piled with thin-sliced steak, ham, cheese, egg, lettuce, tomato, and often bacon and olives, widely considered the country's national sandwich. Like Argentina, Uruguay is devoted to dulce de leche, a thick, sweet caramel made from slowly cooked milk and sugar, spread on bread, layered into desserts, and folded into pastries.

Everyday life: relationships, family, and home

Family life in both countries follows broadly similar Southern Cone patterns: close extended families, grandparents often involved in raising grandchildren, and a strong culture of shared meals, whether an asado in Uruguay or a Sunday family lunch in Paraguay. Both societies have grown more secular and less rigid around traditional gender roles over recent decades, though change has moved at different speeds.

On one significant point the two countries currently differ, and it is worth stating plainly rather than glossing over: Uruguay legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2013, one of the earliest countries in Latin America to do so, alongside its 2012 legalization of abortion. Paraguay, by contrast, remains more socially conservative on these questions; as of this writing, Paraguay has no nationwide law recognizing same-sex marriage, and abortion remains illegal there except in narrow circumstances such as danger to the mother's life. Both positions reflect real, current differences in law and public opinion between the two countries rather than any single "Southern Cone" norm.

School, work, and the economy

Paraguay's economy is smaller and more agriculture-dependent than most of its neighbors', built heavily around soy, which Paraguay exports in enormous volumes relative to its size, along with beef and other cattle products. A distinctive and important second pillar is hydroelectric revenue: Itaipu, run jointly with Brazil, and Yacyreta, run jointly with Argentina, together give Paraguay access to far more electricity than it can use domestically, and the sale of the surplus, along with payments and royalties tied to the dams, provides a meaningful share of government revenue. Even so, Paraguay remains one of the smaller and poorer economies in South America by income per person, with a large informal sector and a workforce still concentrated in agriculture compared to more urbanized and industrialized neighbors.

Uruguay's economy is smaller than Argentina's or Brazil's in absolute terms but notably diversified and stable for a country its size. Beef and other agricultural exports (soy, rice, dairy) remain central, alongside a substantial forestry and wood-pulp industry built on large eucalyptus and pine plantations developed since the 1990s. In recent decades Uruguay has also built a genuinely competitive technology and software services sector, exporting IT services out of proportion to its small population, and it markets itself internationally on the strength of its low corruption, strong rule of law, and political predictability, qualities that stand out sharply against the more volatile economic and political histories of some of its larger neighbors.

Language, idioms, and words to know

Paraguay's bilingualism is worth dwelling on, because it is a genuinely unusual case in the Americas. Spanish is the language of government, law, and formal education, but Guarani, an indigenous language with no relation to Spanish or any other European language, is spoken by a majority of the population and has been a co-official language since 1992.

Don't be confused: Guarani is a living, everyday language, not a preserved relic. In much of the Americas, indigenous languages survive mainly among small remaining indigenous communities and are actively endangered. Guarani in Paraguay is different: it is spoken across social classes, including by people with no indigenous ancestry, used in casual conversation, popular music, and advertising, and taught in schools alongside Spanish. It functions as a genuinely national, mainstream language rather than a minority or heritage tongue.

A few Guarani words that have entered everyday Paraguayan Spanish: "che" (used similarly to the Argentine "che," roughly "hey" or "mate," though the word actually has separate Guarani origins meaning "my" or "I"), and "mba'e" (roughly "thing" or "what," used in casual exclamations).

Uruguayan Spanish is close kin to the Rioplatense Spanish spoken across the river in Argentina, described further in Argentina, sharing the same distinctive "vos" form of informal "you" in place of "tu," and the same "sh"-like pronunciation of the letters "ll" and "y." An outsider can generally expect an Argentine and a Uruguayan to sound almost identical, though Uruguayans and Argentines themselves are often quick to point out small differences in vocabulary and rhythm between the two.

A few useful Spanish phrases common to both countries: "hola" (hello), "gracias" (thank you), "por favor" (please), "che" (hey, used to get someone's attention informally).

Famous places to know

• The Jesuit mission ruins of Trinidad and Jesus de Tavarangue, in southern Paraguay, the best-preserved of the old reducciones and UNESCO World Heritage sites, with stone church walls, carved stonework, and layouts that still show how these mission towns were organized.
• The Itaipu Dam, on the Parana River on the Paraguay-Brazil border, one of the largest hydroelectric power plants in the world and a source of national pride and revenue for Paraguay.
• Montevideo, Uruguay's capital and largest city, a relaxed Atlantic-facing capital known for its historic Ciudad Vieja (Old City), its long riverside promenade called the Rambla, and its everyday cafe and mate culture.
• Punta del Este, a glamorous beach resort town on Uruguay's Atlantic coast, popular with wealthy vacationers from across South America, especially Argentina and Brazil.
• Colonia del Sacramento, a small, beautifully preserved colonial town on Uruguay's coast, founded by Portugal in 1680 specifically to contest Spanish control of the region, now a UNESCO World Heritage site known for its cobblestone streets and mixed Portuguese-Spanish colonial architecture.

Fitting in: visiting, impressing people, and being a good citizen

If someone offers to share mate (or terere in Paraguay) with you, it comes with real etiquette worth knowing. The group typically shares one gourd and one metal straw, called a bombilla, passed from person to person; the person serving (called the cebador or cebadora) refills it and hands it to the next person in turn, who drinks the whole thing through the straw before handing it back to be refilled and passed on, rather than sipping and passing it half-finished. Saying "gracias" (thank you) as you hand it back signals that you are finished for good and do not want another turn, so it is common practice to stay quiet until you actually mean to opt out.

General Southern Cone politeness applies in both countries: greet people warmly, often with a single kiss on the cheek among friends and acquaintances, be reasonably punctual for business but relaxed about social timing, and show genuine interest in local food, football, and history. In Paraguay, learning even a word or two of Guarani is warmly received as a sign of respect for a language many outsiders do not realize is still so widely spoken. Entry and visa requirements depend on nationality and change over time, so check official government sources before traveling; this is general information, not legal advice.

Suggested reading, news, and links

Books

• Look for well-reviewed general histories of the War of the Triple Alliance and of Paraguay's 20th century, since English-language coverage of Paraguay specifically is thinner than for its larger neighbors; a librarian or bookseller can point to current, well-regarded academic titles.
• For Uruguay, biographies and profiles of Jose Mujica are widely available in English and offer an accessible entry point into modern Uruguayan politics and the Tupamaros era.

News

• The BBC and major international newswires provide English-language coverage of both countries, though usually less extensive than for Brazil or Argentina.
• In Paraguay, ABC Color and Ultima Hora are among the leading national newspapers.
• In Uruguay, El Pais (Uruguay's, not to be confused with the Spanish newspaper of the same name) and El Observador are widely read national outlets.

Useful links

• The official national tourism sites for Paraguay and for Uruguay.
• The BBC country profiles for Paraguay and Uruguay.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica entries on Paraguay and Uruguay for reliable overviews.

Today, and how to talk about it

Paraguay and Uruguay are often mentioned only in passing next to Argentina and Brazil, but they are worth understanding on their own terms, and the contrast between them is itself instructive. Paraguay's history is marked by extremes: extreme isolation under Francia, extreme sacrifice in the War of the Triple Alliance, and one of the longest dictatorships in Latin America under Stroessner, alongside a genuinely rare linguistic success story in the everyday survival of Guarani. Uruguay's history, especially from Batlle y Ordonez onward, is marked by a repeated pattern of building stable, progressive institutions, having them interrupted by crisis (the Tupamaros, the dictatorship), and rebuilding them again, more durably, on the other side, culminating in a period defined internationally by a former guerrilla who became one of the most admired heads of state anywhere in the world.

Talking about either country well means resisting the urge to fold them entirely into their larger neighbors. Paraguay is not simply a smaller Argentina or Brazil, and its Guarani heritage and its own particular national trauma give it a distinct identity worth naming directly. Uruguay is not simply a quieter Argentina either, and its record on secularism, corruption, and social legislation reflects choices its own leaders and voters made, not an accident of proximity. Both are small countries that have, at different points, mattered far more to regional and even world history, from a catastrophic 19th century war to a 21st century cannabis law, than their size would suggest.

Next, to the corner of the continent shaped by Dutch, British, and French colonization rather than Spanish or Portuguese 👉 The Guianas