Regular followers of our photo blog may have noticed that our country counter was recently updated to 130 UN countries visited. On our recent trip “Uruguay and the Amazon“, we visited Paraguay, a country to which we’d never been before.
Visiting a new country is something that’s becoming increasingly rare for us. Not because we are out of countries to visit; 130 is only two-thirds of the 193 UN countries in the world! Rather, it’s because we are looking for “the most interesting places in the world” to visit instead of simply going somewhere in order to check a box. Lately, we have found that returning to countries that we’ve already visited for a more in-depth look or to see a new part of the country is more compelling than going somewhere new just because it’s new. Sadly, there’s also an increasing number of countries on our “maybe someday” list such as Iran, Venezuela, Lebanon, and Mali that we’d like to visit but cannot due to world events and safety concerns.
Paraguay was a great country to visit for several reasons:
It’s virtually untouristed; in a world where cities, or even entire countries are limiting or even actively discouraging visitors and other destinations are choked with crowds, Paraguay is a breath of fresh air. People are genuinely friendly and welcoming, and we visited UNESCO world heritage locations where there were only half a dozen tourists on the site.
Speaking of UNESCO sites (which we wrote about as a travel trend); Paraguay is in a small group of ~30 countries that have just one UNESCO World Heritage Site. The top five countries have more than 50 WHS each (accounting for nearly 25% of the total) and there are 26 countries that have signed the UNESCO pact but have no sites. The fact that Paraguay has just one does not mean that there’s nothing to see, it means that a bit of work is needed to decide where to go and what to see (and that you won’t be fighting hordes of tourists when you get there!).
For fans of quirky, geography facts; Paraguay is the only sovereign country with a double sided flag (as pictured above).
It looks like Paraguay may be the only new country that we’ll visit in 2026. We are ticketed for another three trips this year (see our Future Trips page) and we’ll visit seven different countries, but all seven will be a return visit!
Visit our Paraguay post for the full trip report about this little-visited country, or our Uruguay and the Amazon page to see all of our posts from our first trip of 2026.