Ybycuí

Ybycuí National Park was established in 1973 in the department of Paraguarí, in southern Paraguay, and protects some 50 km². It is one of the oldest and most visited national parks in the country.

It preserves a fragment of the Upper Paraná Atlantic Forest, the formation that covered eastern Paraguay and that has lost more than ninety per cent of its original extent to the expansion of soy and cattle farming, until it was reduced to isolated islands. The park protects one of those islands, with gallery forest, waterfalls over basalt rock and a fauna that includes black howler monkey, toucans, black-fronted piping guan and a notable diversity of butterflies.

Within its boundaries survive the ruins of La Rosada, the ironworks that the Paraguayan state set up in 1850 and that was one of the first in South America, a symbol of the country's nineteenth-century project of industrialisation. The foundry was destroyed by Brazilian troops in 1869, during the War of the Triple Alliance, and its remains, with the furnace and the water channels, are built into the park's visitor route as a historical museum.