Museo de la Tierra Guarani, Alto Parana Department, Paraguay

2EdGrogan 5:00 PM Dec 20, 2014

So-so, more of a Paraguay History Timeline museum
This museum is part of a larger installation that includes research facilities and a local wildlife zoo. I guess that's why they want to see your documentation at the entrance. If your interest in visiting the museum is to see artifacts, forget it. The exhibit consists of a long timeline, with documentary photographs, covering the history of Paraguay. The early parts cover all of the pre-Colombian settlements going back thousands of years, not just the Guaraní, describing their methods of subsistence, their tools, their conjectured origins, etc. There are some posters that cover native culture, language, etc. The timeline moves on to the arrival of the Europeans and their impact on the natives. Eventually, though, we get to the nineteenth and then twentieth centuries, and the timeline proceeds to speak of all the intrigues and conflicts and alliances among the Europeans and their descendants, all the way through independence and Stroessner and democracy thereafter--with no further discussion at all of the Guaraní after a certain point. So I don't know why they don't just call it the Paraguay History Museum. The Guaraní are covered, but they aren't consistently the focus. The history is given in three languages, Spanish, Portuguese, and English. The English is OK, but less than completely adept, and there's some laughable or even inexplicable phrasing. On the other hand, the museum is very close to the dam, the history is informative as long as you aren't misled by the name of the museum, and if you want to go to the zoo as well or otherwise have time to kill, it couldn't hurt to stop here. I ran through it all in 45 minutes.