🇵🇾 Paraguay · Chaco and Pantanal
Loma Plata is the oldest of the Mennonite colonies of the Paraguayan Central Chaco and the heart of the Menno Colony. Founded by Mennonite immigrants who arrived in 1927 to colonize the inhospitable Chaco, today it's a thriving, orderly and prosperous city, a symbol of how faith, discipline and cooperative work transformed a semi-desert region into an agricultural and, above all, dairy hub of national reach. Here is the Chortitzer cooperative, one of the country's great companies.
Visiting Loma Plata is a glimpse into a surprising Paraguay: tidy streets, Central European-style houses, a Low German (Plautdietsch) still heard on the streets and an epic history of pioneers who survived the thirst, heat and isolation of the Chaco's 'Green Hell'. Its Menno Colony History Museum tells that colonizing feat, and the nearby salt lagoons, like Laguna Capitán, offer one of the best bird-watching experiences in the Chaco, including the flamingos that arrive from the Andean highlands.
This guide covers the practical side of Loma Plata: its Mennonite history and the museum that tells it, the dairy production and the cooperative, the lagoons and the wildlife of the surroundings, and what it's like to travel through the Central Chaco, with its distances, its climate and its logistics. Together with Filadelfia, Loma Plata is the gateway to understanding the deep Chaco and the incredible adventure of the Mennonites in the center of Paraguay.
Loma Plata was born in 1927 as the first settlement of the Menno Colony, founded by Mennonites of German origin who came to the Paraguayan Chaco —many from Canada and, later, from Russia/Ukraine— seeking lands where they could live according to their faith and preserve their language and customs. They faced very harsh conditions in a semi-desert region known as the 'Green Hell', but with cooperative organization they turned the Central Chaco into a prosperous agricultural and dairy hub, driven today by the Chortitzer cooperative. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The great department of the dry Chaco: the largest in the country, scene of the 1932 Battle of Boquerón that gave it its name, heart of the Mennonite colonies of Filadelfia and Loma Plata —a dairy and beef powerhouse— and ancestral territory of the Nivaclé, Enlhet and Ayoreo.
Read the history of Boquerón →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In 1927, a group of families who barely spoke Spanish got off a train and carts at the most inhospitable point of Paraguay: the Central Chaco, a plain of thorny scrubland and crushing heat that already had a sinister nickname, the 'Green Hell'. They weren't fleeing a war or seeking gold. They came from Canada, spoke a sixteenth-century German dialect and asked for only one thing: to be allowed to live according to their faith. A century later, in that same place where many died of thirst, there is a city of tree-lined streets, cooperative supermarkets and one of the largest dairy industries in the country. That city is Loma Plata, and this is the story of how it came to exist.
The Mennonites are a branch of Anabaptist Christianity that emerged in Europe in the sixteenth century, taking its name from the Dutch reformer Menno Simons. Their principles —adult baptism, pacifism, the refusal of military service and of taking oaths, and separate community life— led them to suffer persecution and to migrate again and again in search of places to practice their faith freely. Over the centuries they moved from the Netherlands and northern Germany to Prussia, then to Russia (present-day Ukraine) and, later, to America.
In the early twentieth century, many Mennonite communities settled in Canada came into conflict with the authorities over the obligation to school their children in English-language public schools, which they saw as a threat to their language (Low German or Plautdietsch), their faith and their way of life. Seeking a country that would guarantee them religious and educational autonomy and exemption from military service, they set their sights on Paraguay.
The Paraguayan government, interested in populating and developing the inhospitable Chaco —then almost unpopulated and in a territorial dispute with Bolivia—, offered the Mennonites broad guarantees through a special law (the 'Privilegium'). In exchange for colonizing those very harsh lands, they obtained religious freedom, their own schools and military exemption. Thus, what seemed an impossible destination became the new home of thousands of Mennonites.
In 1927 the first large contingent of Mennonite settlers arrived in the Central Chaco, mostly from Canada, and founded the Menno Colony, with Loma Plata as its nucleus. What they found was an extreme territory: the dry Chaco, a plain of thorny scrubland, scorching heat, water scarcity and disease. The first years were extremely harsh —hence the nickname 'Green Hell'—, with deaths from thirst, fevers and exhaustion, lost harvests and enormous difficulties in obtaining drinking water and producing food.
Many settlers died or were on the verge of abandoning the undertaking. But, with an unshakeable faith, an iron discipline of work and, above all, a cooperative organization that pooled efforts and resources, the Mennonites persevered. They dug wells, opened roads, experimented with crops and cattle adapted to the climate, and gradually tamed the region. The Menno Colony was later joined by others, like Fernheim (centered in Filadelfia) and Neuland, formed by Mennonites fleeing the Soviet Union.
The Chaco War (1932-1935) between Paraguay and Bolivia broke out precisely around the region the Mennonites were colonizing, adding danger and tension to an already difficult life. However, the colonies survived and, once the war was over, continued their growth, laying the foundations of future prosperity.
The young Menno Colony went through, barely five years after its founding, one of the most traumatic episodes of twentieth-century South American history: the Chaco War, which pitted Paraguay and Bolivia against each other for control of the region, partly because of the suspicion that it hid oil. The conflict, one of the bloodiest in South America that century, was fought largely on the lands the Mennonites were only beginning to colonize.
Faithful to their pacifist doctrine, the settlers of Loma Plata and the other colonies did not fight, but the war reached them anyway: they saw troops pass through their lands, suffered requisitions and the enormous logistical difficulties of a country at war added to those they already faced due to the harshness of the climate. Some historians note that the presence of the colonies, with their water wells and their incipient production, ended up being a valuable resource for the Paraguayan troops fighting in the area.
Paraguay emerged victorious and consolidated its sovereignty over most of the Chaco, which in the long run benefited the stability and development of the Mennonite colonies. The end of the war in 1935 allowed Loma Plata and the Menno Colony to resume, with greater calm, the consolidation process they had been going through since 1927.
The secret of Mennonite success in the Chaco was cooperativism. Instead of competing among themselves, the settlers organized into cooperatives that gathered production, bought inputs jointly, industrialized the milk and the meat, and financed schools, hospitals, roads and services. In Loma Plata, that institution is the Chortitzer cooperative, which over time became one of the most important dairy and agro-industrial companies in Paraguay.
Cattle raising and milk production proved especially successful in the Central Chaco, and the dairy brands of the Mennonite cooperatives (like those of Chortitzer) came to dominate the national market. To the dairy industry were added the production of meat, oilseeds, peanuts and other lines, plus trade and services. The transformation was radical: from a handful of thirsty pioneers in 1927 to orderly, prosperous and modern cities in a few decades.
That same cooperative promoted, besides productive development, environmental conservation initiatives such as the creation of the Laguna Capitán nature reserve, testimony that the agro-industrial development of the Chaco was not, at least in part, at odds with the protection of its most singular ecosystems, home to flamingos and other migratory birds.
In 1977, on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Menno Colony, the community of Loma Plata built its History Museum on the city's Central Avenue, with the purpose of preserving the memory of the founding epic for the new generations and for visitors. The museum brings together objects, photographs, tools and reconstructed dwellings from the early years, and has become the main starting point for understanding the history of the Mennonite colonization of the Central Chaco.
Today, almost a century after the arrival of the first settlers, Loma Plata is a city of orderly, tree-lined streets, with a diversified economy that combines the dairy and cattle production of the Chortitzer cooperative with trade, services and, increasingly, tourism. The coexistence between Mennonite culture, the indigenous peoples of the Chaco and Paraguayans from other regions remains a defining trait of the area's identity.
Loma Plata thus stands as a living testimony that faith, community organization and persevering work can transform even the most hostile environment. Its history, that of its neighboring colonies (Filadelfia and Neuland) and that of the indigenous peoples who share the territory, make up one of the most singular and least-known chapters of Paraguayan and South American history.