The Chaco, an emptiness that is not empty

Anyone looking at a map of Paraguay for the first time notices an asymmetry. East of the Paraguay river, where Asunción, Encarnación and Ciudad del Este sit, the territory is dense with names. To the west there is an enormous, almost blank patch, crossed by a single straight line.

That line is Route 9. The patch is the Chaco.

A territory, not a landscape

The Chaco is not a desert, although in August it looks like one. It is a thorny dry forest of low trees, columnar cacti, palms and impenetrable undergrowth, and it changes character completely with the rains. In the far west the soil is saline and the vegetation thins; to the north, along the Bolivian border, there are stretches of low scrub among the most inhospitable on the continent.

The amount of life it holds is not visible in an afternoon. This is a country of large mammals — giant armadillos, anteaters, peccaries, cats — and of exceptional birdlife, and it is precisely the difficulty of access that has preserved very large portions of it.

Who lives there

Three presences overlap in the same space.

The Indigenous communities, who have inhabited the Chaco since long before any border: groups with different languages and histories, some of whom maintain a close relationship with the forest and its seasons.

The Mennonite colonies, established from the 1920s and 1930s, who built a functioning agricultural and cooperative system in the middle of the dry forest: Filadelfia, Loma Plata and Neuland are orderly centres with dairies, silos and processing industries, and account for a significant part of the country's dairy production.

And extensive cattle ranching, which in recent decades has pushed westward and made the Chaco one of the main fronts in Paraguay's debate over land use.

Crossing it

The Transchaco is straight, well maintained on the first stretch and harder afterwards. Distances between service stations are measured in hundreds of kilometres and phone coverage is not continuous. You leave with a full tank, plenty of water and a clear idea of where you will sleep.

The compensation is a quality of light and silence found nowhere else in the country. At dawn, while the temperature is still bearable, the road ahead vanishes into a single point and the forest on both sides is full of sound.

Why it is worth it

Because the Chaco explains Paraguay by contrast. A country that describes itself through greenery, water and the density of its relationships has, across half its surface, exactly the opposite: distance, dryness, effort.

Understanding that half changes how you look at the other.