Ciudad Del Este

good for shopping only

good for shopping only

I went to Ciudad del Este for a couple of days. I visited an impressive set of Jesuit mission ruins (Trinidad), and I took a ride out into the selva (rainforest) – some scary looking spiders out there!
The city itself was basically just a blackmarket zone. If you don’t mind haggling you can pick up all sorts of cheap stuff – (but I wouldn’t necessarily vouch for the quality). Otherwise it seemed full of hustle and bustle, but no real charm or places of interest that I discovered.

When I went over the bridge from Foz (in Brazil) to Ciudad del Este, no-one asked for our passports or implied we needed to get them stamped. When we left Paraguay we crossed at Posadas. The bridge was manned by officials with guns who complained that we didn’t have our passport stamped, and then began asking for money to let us cross, threatening us with jail if we didn’t pay up. Seemed like a bit of a put-up job.

Most people cross from the Iguassu Falls to Ciudad del Este for looking at a big bazaar style shopping area for electronics and the sort.

There are great attractions, however, that includes the Itaipu Dam one of the seven wonders of the modern world in Hernandarias, the Saltos del Monday and the Moises Bertoni Museum in Presidente Franco and several eco reserves for the preservation of the local wildlife (Tati Yupi, Limoy, Carapa, Itabo and more).

Like most people I spent about 20 minutes here just to say I’d been to paraguay while staying at Iguacu falls in brazil, and soon wondered why I was wasting time not buying cheap electrical goods when I was right next to some of the most amazing waterfalls in the world (certainly the most amazing I’d ever been to).

I have a photo of this place that says ‘welcome to paraguay’ in spanish, behind a delapidated car and sad looking streets. I’ll try to upload it eventually.

Maybe I should have given it more of a chance, but the beautiful waterfalls were beckonging me.