Carlos Zubizarreta

Carlos Zubizarreta was a writer born in Asunción, Paraguay in 1904.

Founder and director of the famous cultural magazine "Juventud" (Youth) and collaborator of "Alas" (Wings) magazine, he was to some the finest narrator and essayist and most elegant writer in the history of twentieth-century Paraguayan literature.

In his "Historia de la Literatura Paraguaya" (History of Paraguayan Literature, 1971), Hugo Rodríguez-Alcalá wrote that Zubizarreta "... published his first book of essays, "Acuarelas paraguayas" Paraguayan watercolours, in 1940.

These "watercolours" are vivid portraits of customs and folklore painted by a skillful artist – but a painter-historian who sees the Paraguay of today with one eye, and with the other the Paraguay of the past, of Irala, of Montoya, of López y Aguirre and the rest.

In effect, he barely starts to paint modern Asunción ... before its current landscape disappears and a vision of the city of Conquest and Colony arises ... ".