Ciudad del Este

Ciudad del Este was founded in 1957 on the bank of the Paraná as a frontier post, took a dictator's name for three decades and its own after 1989, and grew in the meantime into Paraguay's second city and one of the largest bazaars on the continent: a microcentre of galleries where electronics, perfume and everything else cross the Friendship Bridge into Brazil in a daily tide of shoppers. Twenty minutes north, Itaipú — the dam Paraguay and Brazil built together in the seventies, for decades the largest generator of electricity on Earth — holds back the river with a wall seven kilometres long.

The traveller comes mostly on the way to somewhere and finds reasons to stay a day: the free tour of Itaipú, whose spillway in flood is a spectacle of its own; the Saltos del Monday, forty metres of falls in the forest just outside town, a quiet cousin of Iguazú; the bazaars themselves, best on a weekday morning, with the Lebanese, Chinese and Taiwanese communities that run them and the mosque and Buddhist temple they built; the Lago de la República for the city's afternoon; and, across the bridge and an hour beyond, the falls of Iguazú, from either bank.

The Guide's honesty: the bazaars are real and so are the fakes — buy electronics from established stores with warranties, keep receipts for customs, and count on the bridge queue at any hour that matters —; keep money and phone unshown in the crowds, as in any market city; the heat from October to March is of the wet, exhausting kind; and Ciudad del Este is honest about being a door — through it lie the largest waterfalls in the Americas and the largest dam in the hemisphere, and it asks only a day of your attention on the way.