Metal detectors draw circles a few centimeters above the ground. They sniff around on the surface and report when they find something. Men swing them and sweep through the air over a red earth strewn with bones and treasure. the underground traces of the Triple Alliance Army’s advance through Paraguayan territory. The bones were laid by three-quarters of the country’s male population killed in battle; The families buried the gold to avoid looting Today it angers thousands of prospectors who delve into the bowels of their land to find Yvyguy silver, the buried fortune of one of the wealthiest American cities of the 19th century.
Pronounced quickly, almost immediately, Plata yvyguy means buried or hidden silver in Guaraní. In this language, grandparents tell their grandchildren that Paraguay is a land full of treasures to be found: the land of Charles III. Jesuits driven out with shovels, that of the ships loaded with riches that descended from the Amazon and sank in the Paraguay River, and the one that the neighbors buried when the pursuit of the enemy troops was at hand so as to leave nothing to the invader.
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For families, these burials were the domestic equivalent of what the Great War meant on a national level: the burial of their wealth. As if it wanted to be exhumed, the Yvyguy Silver calls out to the adventurers. It tempts them with yellow, green and red fires, the glow that metals release as they rust underground, or directly with pores, ghosts or spirits, depending on how much the person seeing them is in the delusions of the caught in gold fever.
The stories of treasure hunters who changed their lives through a stroke of luck fuel the illusions of young upstarts and experienced old men; of rich people with detection devices worth thousands of dollars and of poor people guided by precarious hand-made dowsing rods; by sporting opportunists who take to the field from time to time as a hobby, and by experts who live exclusively from the clandestine harvest of Yvyguy silver. There are many who, before building on the land, turn it over like a sock to see if it hides anything; Nor those who, enchanted by a local legend or an auspicious sign, find their lives inches away from what was meant to save them.
Fishing on land
Renato, manager of the Detectores Paraguay company, says the search is tiring. After spending all day in the middle of the mountains being eaten by mosquitoes, a hot whisper usually comes out of his mouth, diluted in the Paraguayan humidity: “Why the hell am I doing this?”. As soon as he finishes saying it, he hears the beep. “You say Grandpa, Grandpa, there’s something here. Your blood begins to rush to your head, all your desires are renewed. There are times when you travel for hours in the mountains without hearing a beep, the machine is silent, the insects are around you and nothing.” The statement speeds up, as if Renato were in the country and would broadcast the adventure live, but in reality he tells the story from his base, the metal detector business he founded in San Lorenzo, forty minutes from Asunción.
Renato already knew his way around before he moved to Paraguay. He is from Porto Alegre, Brazil, and moved to the neighboring country after falling in love with the story of Yvyguy Silver while on vacation. “I loved this legend. The overall gold theme is very strong here. It is a city with a long history of treasures that come from three situations: that of the Jesuit Fathers in the south, that of the Triple Alliance War and that of the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia. These are all very productive search areas,” explains the Brazilian.
Gold fever appears to be contagious, a condition transmitted through the guaran voice.í: “Anyone who starts with silver Yvyguy starts with an old story, something his grandfather told him, with comments about the streets the troops passed.” It starts on this page. We are talking about things buried by one’s own family, by rich ancestors with many possessions. “There were no banks back then, so these riches were buried to protect them.”says the 33-year-old search engine.
The word of the ancients is not an illusory melancholy without an object. Before the war, Paraguay became an area lined with railroad tracks and telegraph lines that could accommodate Latin America’s first iron foundry, “La Rosada,” in Ybycuí. The export of grass and tobacco had helped several families to become wealthy. The pound sterling, franc and other international currencies circulated in abundance in a country that was becoming a steel power.
What would be seen as something extraordinary and incredible for ordinary people is something everyday for Renato. Your customers find gold quite often. Just a day before speaking to El Destape, a customer placed him on the bar’s counter the eighteen grams he took out on his first test outing with a new machine. At thirty-five dollars a gram, the man got 630 shades of green in a short period of time.
“And that is the price of gold measured by market value, excluding historical value. If you bring a sprat or an old coin like a pound sterling, it can be worth much more. For those who are dedicated to this topic, The detector is something that pays off. This man, for example, lives by searching for gold. “He dedicates 110% of his time to searching for treasures”comments the person in charge of Detectores Paraguay.
If successful, expeditions to search for buried things are divided into two moments. One in which fatigue overwhelms and resignation to the uncertainty of discovery becomes a tempting thought that keeps recurring and grows quickly like a swelling. And another one in which every dream becomes possible. The boundary that separates these two hemispheres is drawn by the beeping of the detectors and cuts through the silence of the field. But the treasure hunt is a bit like gambling and nothing can be found. He gives himself a lot and often the earth becomes ungrateful, he keeps the golden metal for himself. In these cases, the days consist only of sweat, dirt and mosquitoes.
Renato compares it to fishing: “You have your bait on the line and wait for the fish to bite. Time goes by. When the signal appears, the joy is enormous; you have to curb this fear and enthusiasm a little. You have to dig slowly because there could be a gold coin worth $1,500 underneath. The shovel is heavy, hard and if it hits the middle it will break. You have to dig patiently and slowly until you get there. The joy of finding something is enormous. You take something out and think about the years it was buried there, untouched. It makes you think of the extreme situation people were in, burying things like that.”
In Renato’s shop, there are scores of detectors hanging on the walls. There are many models and accessories: folding scoops, sieves, covers and boxes. In the middle there is a small table with a glass top, under which some conquests are displayed. “Something good, beautiful and cheap is initially worth between 130 and 140 dollars. Already a mid-range device with which you can play well and immerse yourself in the real Yvyguy Silver theme costs around 450 dollars. And if you want something high-end, looking deep, very deep, the devices are around $1200. Then there’s the best of the best: it costs fifteen thousand, but it’s a machine that transports you from far away. You sit in your truck, he points at you and you follow the direction. It’s the best of the best of the best,” explains Renato.
Graves of history
If we talk about detectors, Hernán Candia Román boasts of bringing the first all-metal detector to Paraguay after returning from his stay in the United States. With this team he had fun on the beaches of the northern country and “saved coins and cash” to pass the time. He returned in 1992 after spending twelve years between the United States and Cuba to study medicine.
Today, already based in Paraguay, Candia is director of the Latin American Foundation for Education and Ecology (LAEEF) and is dedicated to teaching professional naturopathy courses remotely. In addition to his training offer to become a doctor, his WhatsApp number and several contact channels also appear on the website of his natural healing center. Every now and then someone approaches him and asks him about something that has nothing to do with medicine. The memories of the Sun’s scourge, the long years of sacrifice and the immense investments paid off, are an involuntary memory unleashed with a message or email containing the two trigger words: silver and vyguy .
“Back here in Paraguay, I soon met other people who were interested in history and rescue. So we did a project, pooled together capital and everyone contributed the equipment they had. I used a double cab truck for the trips. “It started in 1997,” remembers Dr. Candia.
The team’s goal was clear and ambitious: to rescue all buried metal objects from the period of the War against the Triple Alliance (1864–1870) and the Chaco War (1832–1835). The group created an itinerary to begin their colossal task. They began in Paso de Patria, in the south of the country, on the border with Argentina, where more or less the first fighting broke out.
“We scanned, examined and collected history in all the battle sites such as Curupayty, Humaitá, Estero Bellaco, Tuyutí and in all the territories occupied at the time, such as the San Fernando Ranch. We followed the same path as the Paraguayan troops during the five-year conflict,” explains Candia.
The legion of treasure hunters who traveled in the doctor’s car He managed to retrieve more than two thousand pieces from the earth, which now rest in the Fernando de la Mora Historical Museum, founded by the group in 2001. It was two years of continuous travel, visiting more than five hundred places, accompanied by locals who claimed to be able to give the exact coordinates where the relics of the war slept soundly. Candia says that more than 98% of these “safe places where treasures were buried” were pure illusions or the desire of compatriots to gain wealth.
In addition to the treasures he was able to retrieve from the depths of the Paraguayan soil, the doctor also keeps other treasures that he collected on these trips. Remember that Paraguayan families welcomed them with open arms and gave them everything they had in their homes. Because they felt like they were being heard, people published snippets of stories told from generation to generation that, true or not, Candia kept in another museum, personal, deep in her memory.
Lights and death
Raúl López Ortego, who has written several stories on the subject, remembers with wonder how excavations began in the late 1960s. He was also surprised by the number of tall, pale, blonde figures wandering around like zombies with strange artifacts in their hands. They were Yankees or Europeans on a treasure hunt.
A photo serves as a portrait of the gold rush in Paraguay: In the backyard of Dr. At Villagra Marsal’s house, the family began digging between pear and apple trees. At three in the morning, just as the shovel hit something solid, they heard screams, howls and gunshots. Shocked, they left the job half-finished. In the morning, as they were about to continue their work, they saw a hole with a clearly visible rectangular outline in the earth of the well they were digging. Someone had either played a prank on them or given them an unsolicited hand. As the months went by, the family noticed some neighbors changing their cars or making somewhat excessive repairs to their homes.
Ortego assures El Destape that the story is real and that it is at the same time part of the popular mythology surrounding Yvyguy silver; a collection of legends, beliefs and fables that hasten the debauchery of the seekers These include stories about white dogs showing up in the afternoon to show where the gold is, about the ghost of a mounted general pointing the right direction, or about the persistent figure of a woman in white in every Latin American myth Gold haunts area. . But there are two elements of this collection of tales that seem like something out of a movie but are real: the lights and the dead.
When they see the lights, the Baquianos shout “Hendy pa, hendy pa.” It means “it lights up” in Guaraní and is usually heard on rainy days or in swampy areas, the ideal conditions for the water to penetrate the earth and allow the gas cloud released by the oxidized metals to escape through this improvised pipe.
Then appear the will-o’-the-wisps, balls of glowing light that sometimes even move irregularly and which some call poras, ghosts or spirits, which wander the landscape and are a sign of gold. Both Renato and Dr. Candia are skeptical. They give details about the oxidation of metals and make it clear that it is a reaction with oxygen, something entirely natural, although the story of the ghosts is less unbelievable than some macabre war scenes, such as that of the children they put in soldiers’ clothes and mustaches were drawn under their noses to use as a human barrier against the Brazilian troops.
It may seem like a trite, worn-out poetic motif, a romantic platitude, but the metaphor is apt: some seekers actually go to these fires like the butterfly.to die in them. Every now and then there is a common line in the newspaper news with silver and death. Renato has met three since the store opened. He particularly considered Don Francisco his friend. He was a regular customer of the company, a 75-year-old gold prospector who was following the trail of a marked treasure six or seven meters underground.
“He started digging, digging, digging. It was a semi-swampy ground, an estuary. He placed large barrels in it for whistling, such as those for oil. This is how it went: intubate and descend, intubate and descend. When he was five meters away, the pressure of the water and the earth enveloped him, squeezed him and that was it: he died. It happened as soon as the pandemic ended. He was a man who talked to me a lot, he was my friend. I was very sad, it was very shocking. I knew Francisco very well, he was a high-profile person and he died of carelessness,” says Renato.
The memories of Ortego and Candia are circulating in books. Plata Yvyugy Recaha is the work of the doctor, while Ortego published several stories that can be read on the Internet. Renato continues to conduct research, sell detectors and instruct customers on how to use them. He advises them to avoid danger and problems with landowners and not to search on official battlefields, which is prohibited by law. The place works well, people come and ask more and more questions. The underground search for the remains of the once rich country becomes a national sport.