South America's Overlooked Carnival Capital — the beach town on the Paraná River with the Jesuit missions in the jungle behind it, the only Carnival outside Rio that UNESCO takes seriously, and a lakeside promenade that replaced a town
Encarnación is Paraguay's second city, located on the Paraná River across from Posadas, Argentina, and best known internationally for two things: its Carnival (the largest in Paraguay and arguably the most spectacular in South America outside Brazil and Uruguay) and the nearby Jesuit Missions — the extraordinary 17th–18th century reductions where Jesuits and Guaraní people created remarkable Baroque architecture in the jungle. The city itself was flooded by the construction of the Yacyretá Dam in the 1980s–90s, which submerged the old colonial lower town and replaced it with a purpose-built l…
The Jesuits established the Mission of Santísima Trinidad de Paraná in 1706 and dozens of other missions (reductions) across what is now Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil — creating autonomous Guaraní-Jesuit communities of up to 4,000 people each, with stone churches, schools, music academies, printing presses, and foundries. The reductions were remarkable social experiments: Guaraní converts practised Christianity but maintained their language and much of their culture, and the communities produced extraordinary artisans, musicians, and scholars. The Jesuits were expelled from all Spanish terr…