Ita

Itá is famous across Paraguay for one very specific thing: the santos and figuritas, small painted clay figures — saints, animals, comically fat mermaids, farmers with oversized hats — that have been produced here by generations of the same families since the colonial period. I arrived expecting a quick browse and stayed most of the day, moving from workshop to workshop along Calle Mariscal López, where nearly every third house seems to have a kiln smoking gently in the back patio and a front room lined with shelves of drying clay figures in various stages of paint.

I spent a long stretch of the morning with a woman named Ramona, whose family has made these figures for four generations, watching her paint tiny facial features onto a mermaid with a brush no wider than a few bristles, her hand utterly steady despite the heat and the flies drifting through the open doorway. She told me the wood-fired kilns are lit before four in the morning so the clay can cure through the cool hours, and that she still mixes her own glazes from a recipe her grandmother taught her, refusing modern paints because they “don’t hold the light the same way.”

Beyond the ceramics, Itá turned out to have a genuinely handsome colonial church — the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria — with a squat whitewashed facade and a bell tower that rings with a slightly cracked, homely tone that I found more charming than any perfectly-tuned bell would have been. I sat on the church steps at dusk eating a chipa bought from a woman balancing a basket on her head, watching the smoke from a dozen kilns drift up against a sky turning the exact orange of the clay itself.

When to go: Visit on a weekday morning when the workshops are actively firing and painting; the town holds a dedicated ceramics fair each July that draws artisans from across the region.