Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay 1648 CE
This region is an isolated backwater, thousands of miles from the main centres of Spanish rule.
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What is happening in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay in 1648CE
The predominant indigenous people of what is today northern Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay were the Guarani, who had migrated into the area some centuries before from the Amazon region. They were farmers living in settled villages. Further south, small, mobile groups of hunter-gatherers roamed the grasslands.
The Spanish first attempted to establish a settlement on the south-eastern coasts of Spanish South America in the middle 16th century, at Buenos Aires. Indian attacks forced its abandonment, and the first permanent Spanish settlements were in the fertile land of present-day Paraguay, 1,000 miles inland from the Atlantic coast. The colonists soon started inter-marrying with the indigenous population, there being few European women amongst them.
This region saw the rise of a remarkable kind of community. Members of the Catholic Jesuit Order in Paraguay and southern Brazil gathered Guarani Indians together into settlements organized virtually along monastic lines. Sadly, these communities became prized targets for “Bandeirantes”, slave raiders from the Brazilian coast.
Buenos Aires was re-founded in 1580; but the east coast remained an isolated backwater, thousands of miles from the main centres of Spanish rule.
Next map, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay in 1789
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