Ybytyruzu Mountains

Nobody had told me Paraguay had real mountains, in the sense of forested peaks with genuine elevation and a hiking culture built around them, and the Ybytyruzú range near Villarrica caught me entirely off guard. These are old, eroded peaks — Cerro Tres Kandú, the highest, tops out around 850 meters, modest by Andean standards but startling in a country whose landscape is otherwise defined by flat lowland and low rolling hills. Driving toward them from the surrounding farmland, the peaks simply rise out of nowhere, forested and blue-gray in the distance, like a landscape that wandered in from a different country.

I hiked Cerro Tres Kandú with a local guide named Aldo, part of a small community-run ecotourism cooperative that has been slowly developing trails and homestays in the villages at the base of the range. The climb took most of a morning, through farmland giving way to increasingly dense subtropical forest, orchids growing on tree trunks at the higher elevations, and at the summit a view that genuinely stopped conversation — layered ridgelines fading into blue haze, patchwork fields far below, and not another hiker in sight the entire day.

The range holds several waterfalls tucked into its folds, and Aldo took Lia and me to the Salto Suizo the following day, a two-tiered cascade dropping through forest into a swimming pool cold enough to make conversation impossible for the first minute after wading in. We stayed the night at a small family homestay in a village at the mountain’s base, eating a dinner of grilled surubí fish caught that afternoon and homemade chipa guasu, the family’s grandmother telling us stories about the mountain’s Guaraní name and the spirits locals still half-believe inhabit its higher slopes.

When to go: April through September brings cooler, clearer weather ideal for the Cerro Tres Kandú climb; arrange a local guide through the community cooperative in Villarrica rather than attempting the less-marked trails alone.