Pilar

Pilar sits on the Río Paraguay in the southwest corner of the country, the capital of Ñeembucú, and it has been a textile town since the Manufactura de Pilar was established in 1930, spinning and weaving cotton on a scale that made it the largest industrial employer in the region and gave the town a character unusual in rural Paraguay. The department around it is wetland: the Ñeembucú marshes, a vast system of lagoons, esteros and flooded grassland running east from the river, holding waterbirds in numbers, capybaras and caimans, and crossed by causeways and boats. The town has a nineteenth-century centre, a river beach and a ferry crossing to Argentina.

History

Settlers from Asunción founded the town on 12 October 1779, by order of the governor Pedro Melo de Portugal, as Villa del Ñeembucú; four years later it took the name Villa del Pilar from the priest Marcial Antonio Uliambre of Zaragoza, and the census of 1783 counted 2,355 inhabitants. Under José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia its port was the only one in Paraguay allowed foreign trade, chiefly in yerba mate; Pilar became a city on 25 January 1908, and in 1930 Paolo Federico Alberzoni built the textile complex that became the Manufactura de Pilar (Wikipedia, Pilar, Paraguay).

Highlights

• The textile mill - the works that has run since 1930.
• The Neembucu wetlands - the marshes and lagoons east of the town.
• The river front - the Paraguay and the beach and ferry.
• The old centre - the nineteenth-century buildings of the town.

When to go

April to October in the cooler dry season for the wetlands and the roads; the wet season floods large areas. Bird numbers are highest in the drier months when water concentrates.

Things to know

Pilar is remote and the roads in are long. Wetland access needs local boats and arrangements. The mill is a working factory rather than a visitor attraction. Facilities in town are modest.

Nearby

The Neembucu wetlands lie east; the Argentine bank is across the river.

Key facts