Paraguay Travel Guide - Travel tips and holiday advice featuring Asuncion and Ciudad del Este restaurants and hotels, Iguazu Falls, Chaco and Pantanal wildlife. Also highlighting off-the-beaten-track sites, suggested itineraries, Jesuit missions and history, birdwatching in Neembucu, Cerro Cora National Park, activities like hiking and rafting.

The new edition of the first and still most comprehensive guidebook to Paraguay in English is engagingly written by a long-term resident. Paraguay is an emerging tourist destination, rapidly improving its facilities but still mercifully free from tourist tat. You can explore savannahs dotted with palm trees, red-earth roads, empty river-beaches, damp Atlantic forests, or the wild Chaco's 'green desert', all without running into another foreigner. You can swing in a hammock chugging slowly upriver, and enjoy some of the best bird-watching in the world. Folk dance, harp playing and handicraft - particularly in sewing - are vibrant, living traditions. This is still a bilingual nation, with Guarani spoken alongside Spanish - its character shaped by the legendary Jesuit missions with their romantic ruins and fine sculptures of saints, where the indigenous remained protected from European exploitation for a century and a half.