Two foreigners are sipping cappuccinos on a Saturday morning in a bustling restaurant in Asuncion, sharing notes on what made them decide to come to Paraguay. “You can really forget about the rest of the world here,” says one, Paul Kittson, an Australian entrepreneur. He is not the first to have come to that conclusion.
For much of the past two centuries this sweltering, landlocked country in the heart of South America has been the destination of choice for those who wanted to get away from it all. Some were utopians: such as the group of socialists from Sydney who set up a colony they called “New Australia” in the 1890s.
Others were escapees, including the Nazis who hid in southern Paraguay in the late 1940s. Still more were isolationists, like the Mennonites from Russia and Germany who came in the 1920s to preserve their traditional way of life, far from modern threats.
