Where Is Paraguay Located?

Paraguay is a landlocked country in south-central South America, sharing borders with Bolivia to the north and west, Brazil to the east and northeast, and Argentina to the south and southwest. Along with Bolivia, it is one of only two countries on the continent with no coastline. The Paraguay River runs through the middle of the country and gives it its name, and the capital, Asuncion, sits on that river near the border with Argentina.

Paraguay’s Geography and Regions

Paraguay covers about 406,752 square kilometers (157,048 square miles), a land area roughly comparable to California, and had an estimated population of about 6.4 million people as of the mid-2020s. The Paraguay River splits the country into two very different halves.

The Eastern Region

East of the river lies the Eastern Region (Region Oriental), a zone of rolling hills, forest remnants, and fertile farmland where the overwhelming majority of Paraguayans live and where most large-scale agriculture takes place. This is also where Asuncion and the country’s other major cities are located.

The Gran Chaco

West of the river spreads the Paraguayan Chaco, part of the larger Gran Chaco, a vast semi-arid plain of scrubland and dry forest shared with Bolivia and Argentina. The Chaco makes up roughly three-fifths of Paraguay’s territory but holds only a small fraction of its population, a divide that has shaped the country’s settlement patterns and economy for generations.

A Brief History of Paraguay

Before European contact, the territory that is now Paraguay was home to Guarani-speaking peoples, whose language and customs went on to shape the country’s identity long after colonization. Spanish colonizers arrived in the 16th century, and in the following century Jesuit missionaries built a network of mission towns, known as reductions, across the region.

The Jesuit Missions

Between the late 1600s and the 1760s, Jesuit priests established settlements that combined Catholic teaching with elements of Guarani social and economic life, partly as a way to shield indigenous communities from the forced-labor system used elsewhere in Spanish colonial America. Two of the best-preserved of these sites, La Santisima Trinidad de Parana and Jesus de Tavarangue, were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage property in 1993 for the way they document this unusual fusion of European and Guarani culture.

Independence, War, and Dictatorship

Paraguay declared independence from Spain in 1811 and, under early rulers such as Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, spent decades largely isolated from its neighbors. That isolation ended violently: the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870), fought against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, proved catastrophic for Paraguay, which lost large amounts of territory and suffered enormous loss of life. Paraguay later fought and won the Chaco War (1932-1935) against Bolivia, securing control of most of the Chaco region. In the 20th century, General Alfredo Stroessner seized power in 1954 and ruled as dictator for thirty-five years, one of the longest periods of authoritarian rule in South America, before being overthrown in a 1989 coup. A new constitution adopted in 1992 restored multiparty democracy and remains in force today.

Government and Economy Today

Paraguay is a presidential republic under its 1992 constitution, with power divided among executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The president serves a single five-year term with no possibility of reelection, and Congress is bicameral, made up of a Chamber of Senators and a Chamber of Deputies elected directly by voters.

The economy is built largely on agriculture, livestock, and hydroelectric power. Paraguay ranks among the world’s leading exporters of soybeans and beef, and it sells much of the electricity it generates to neighboring Brazil and Argentina. According to World Bank estimates, Paraguay’s economy grew an estimated 6.6 percent in 2025, supported by strong agricultural output and steady domestic consumption, with growth projected to moderate toward 4 percent in following years. Even so, the World Bank estimated that about 17.9 percent of Paraguayans lived in poverty in 2025, and informal employment remained high, at roughly 60 percent of the workforce, underscoring the uneven reach of the country’s recent growth.

Culture and People: A Bilingual Nation

Paraguay’s most distinctive cultural feature, and one of its most studied by linguists, is its official bilingualism. Article 140 of the 1992 constitution declares Paraguay “a multicultural and bilingual country,” naming Spanish and Guarani as its two official languages. This makes Paraguay unusual among Latin American nations: rather than being confined mainly to indigenous communities, Guarani is spoken by roughly nine in ten Paraguayans, more than speak Spanish, and it functions as the everyday language of much of the country even though Spanish still dominates government, law, and business. Guarani has only been formally taught in Paraguayan schools since 1996, a relatively recent step in a much longer history of the language as a marker of national identity.

That indigenous heritage also shows up in everyday customs, most visibly in the shared preparation and drinking of yerba mate and its cold variant, terere, traditions with roots in Guarani culture that remain central to social life. Paraguay, together with Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, has proposed the wider “Yerba Mate Cultural Landscape” for UNESCO’s World Heritage Tentative List, a nomination still under review rather than a confirmed listing, but one that reflects how deeply the plant is woven into the region’s identity.

What Is Paraguay Best Known For?

Internationally, two things tend to define Paraguay’s public image. The first is the Itaipu Dam, built jointly with Brazil on the Parana River between 1975 and 1982 and now jointly owned and operated by the two countries. With 20 generating units and 14,000 megawatts of installed capacity, Itaipu is one of the largest hydroelectric power stations in the world by output and has produced more electricity over its lifetime than any other single power plant on record. It supplies around 90 percent of the electricity consumed inside Paraguay.

The second is the Jesuit mission heritage described above: the ruins of Trinidad and Jesus de Tavarangue stand as physical evidence of the 17th- and 18th-century reductions and remain Paraguay’s entry on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Alongside these landmarks, Paraguay’s Spanish-Guarani bilingualism is itself a defining feature, cited by linguists as a rare case of an indigenous American language holding equal legal status with a European colonial language and being used as a majority-population vernacular rather than a minority tongue.

Why Paraguay Matters

Paraguay’s importance on the world stage is disproportionate to its size and population. As a major exporter of soybeans, beef, and hydroelectric power, it plays a meaningful role in South American agricultural and energy trade, and its output has global downstream effects on food and commodity markets. Its history as the site of the Jesuit reductions offers historians and anthropologists a documented, physical record of one of colonial-era America’s more unusual experiments in cross-cultural contact. Perhaps most notably, its living bilingual culture, in which an indigenous language survived colonization, dictatorship, and modernization to remain the everyday speech of most of the population, makes Paraguay a frequently cited case study in language policy, cultural preservation, and national identity in the Americas.

Key Takeaways

• Paraguay is a landlocked country in south-central South America, bordered by Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina, and is one of only two landlocked nations on the continent.
• The Paraguay River divides the country into the fertile, densely populated Eastern Region and the sparsely populated Gran Chaco to the west.
• Spanish and Guarani are both official languages under the 1992 constitution, and Guarani is spoken by roughly 90 percent of Paraguayans, more than speak Spanish.
• The Itaipu Dam, built and owned jointly with Brazil, is one of the world’s largest hydroelectric plants and supplies about 90 percent of Paraguay’s electricity.
• The UNESCO-listed Jesuit Mission ruins of Trinidad and Jesus de Tavarangue preserve remains of 17th- and 18th-century mission settlements that blended European and Guarani culture.
• Decades of dictatorship under Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989) gave way to a new constitution in 1992, which restored multiparty democracy and remains in force.
• Paraguay’s economy, driven by agriculture and hydropower, grew an estimated 6.6 percent in 2025, even as about 18 percent of the population remained in poverty.

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Paraguay”
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “History of Paraguay”
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Itaipu Dam”
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Guarani language”
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Jesuit Missions of La Santisima Trinidad de Parana and Jesus de Tavarangue”
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Yerba Mate Cultural Landscape” (Tentative List)
• Itaipu Binacional, official site
• Constitute Project, “Paraguay’s Constitution of 1992 with Amendments through 2011”
• World Bank, “Paraguay: Macro Poverty Outlook”

Editorially reviewed by Specialty Digest Editorial TeamLast reviewed September 28, 2026Researched and drafted with AI assistanceReport an issue