GO FEEDBACK: On a recent trip to South America, seasoned traveller Cian O'Callaghancame across Paraguay's curious Irish link
EVER BEEN TO Paraguay? Know anyone who's been there? Even be confident of spelling it correctly? Me neither until a few months ago.
In the popular consciousness - actually, in its outer realms, where Paraguay registers with only the most globally aware of travelniks - the landlocked country could best be described as the Belgium of South America. But I suppose they could claim that Tintin put them on the map, so maybe it's more the Luxembourg of South America.
As PJ O'Rourke once claimed, Paraguay is "nowhere and famous for nothing". A history of war, military dictatorships and an absence of beaches has kept it off 99.9 per cent of traveller's South American itineraries.
But if you give it a chance it will reveal itself as one of the most beautiful, interesting and welcoming destinations on the continent, even to demanding, intolerant types such as myself and O'Rourke (who, by the way, fell in love with it after a visit).
For me, a three-day trip, to get away from the 24/7 debauchery of Buenos Aires, lasted a month.
Paraguay is roughly the size of Germany, but half of it is the Gran Chaco, an inhospitable terrain of thorn and cactus accompanied by searing temperatures (but worth a visit to experience the 19th-century traditions of German-speaking Mennonite settlements).
The main area of interest is a relatively small and easily navigable corner in the southeast of the country. Within a few hours one can go from the bedlam of the duty-free supermarket that is the city of Ciudad del Este, on the Brazilian border, to the peaceful town of Encarnación, the gateway to 17th-century Jesuit ruins.
On the way you can visit the secret hideout of the Nazi Josef Mengele, the infamous Angel of Death of Auschwitz, or simply sink into the horizontal nature of Paraguayan rural life.
For me the highlight was the capital, Asunción, a city that has more than 1.4 million inhabitants but retains a small-town charm even while breathing its colourful and often traumatic history.
As you would expect from a South American capital, the city has no shortage of places to drink and dance until daylight, but it is Asunción's fresh, authentic people who set it apart.
A lack of tourists leads to a curiosity and thirst for conversations in locals that is not based on relieving you of your cash. It's comparable to a nation of London cabbies, but without the loudness, obesity or lack of interest in hearing your point of view.
It's thanks to this that I had my questions answered about the Irish place names I kept noticing. A city-centre street - think Henry Street, in Dublin - was named Madame Lynch.
Some investigating revealed it was named after Eliza Lynch, the Cork-born partner of Francisco Solano López, Paraguay's lunatic dictator of the 1860s, who, fancying himself as the Napoleon of South America, declared war on Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, resulting, during the War of the Triple Alliance, in the death of more than half of Paraguay's people and the loss of a third of its territory.
With her country crumbling, Lynch (who became the subject of a 2002 novel by Anne Enright, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch) maintained her lavish and revoltingly inappropriate lifestyle - and also became the world's largest female landowner, with more than 20 million acres to her name.
In 1870, with the war lost and her husband and one of her six sons dead, she fled to Paris with $500,000 in jewels and cash.
In 1875 she returned to Paraguay, to reclaim her property, but was deported. She died penniless in Paris, surely sliding into eternal anonymity. A fitting end for her. But it wasn't.
In the 1970s nationalist historians concluded that she and López were not gluttonous, ludicrous embarassments to the nation's history but Paraguayan heroes.
This was the culmination of the work of a revisionist movement started in the early 1900s by Juan E O'Leary, son of an Irish travelling salesman named John O'Leary. He declared López and Lynch to have been driven by patriotic motives (having reversed his original, bitterly critical appraisals of the pair).
Lynch's remains were brought from Paris to Paraguay amid proclamation of her status as a true Paraguayan heroine, to be interred in a white mausoleum in the suburban La Recoleta cemetery. (López is buried in the Pantheon de los Heroes, a monument in Asunción to the dead of the war of the Triple Alliance.)
O'Leary was also the driving force behind raising awareness of the uniqueness and superiority of Paraguayan indigenous identity, resulting in a strong Guarani flavour to their Spanish (Guarani is the language of Paraguay's precolonial inhabitants).
O'Leary's reward was having a whole district, and Paraguay's equivalent of St Stephen's Green, named in his honour.
So cheap beer, sumptious cuisine - try the empanadas - a curious history, an easy-going pace, beautiful and friendly people, a fantastic climate and a surprising Irish influence: who cares if nobody famous is from Paraguay?
• cianoc123@yahoo.co.uk
Go there: Flights take a couple of hours from most major South American cities, through a host of low-fare airlines. Backpackers can get cheap but comfortable buses from Brazil, Argentina and Chile. The trip takes up to 18 hours, so bring a book.
Accommodation is as cheap as chips. Five-star hotels such as the Crowne Plaza cost from €40 per person sharing. A night in a dirty peeling-wallpaper joint costs about €5.