After Förster's death and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's return to Germany, the inhabitants took the management of the town into their own hands and distanced themselves from the ideas of its founders.
Nueva Germania was founded in 1886 on the banks of the Aguaray-Guazú River, about 250 kilometres from Asunción by five, later fourteen, largely impoverished families from Saxony.
[6][7][8] The colony's development was hampered by the harshness of the environment, a lack of proper supplies, and an overconfidence of the colonist's own supposed Aryan supremacy.
[13] Nueva Germania became a quiet and relatively poor community in the San Pedro district dedicated to agriculture such as the cultivation of yerba mate and soy beans and the raising of cattle, as well as the production of bricks.
One of the most important products of the district is yerba mate, along with sugarcane, cotton, manioc (cassava), tobacco, sunflower, soy, wheat, banana, sweet and sour orange, Paraguayan lemon verbena and sesame.
[14] The General Directorate of Statistics, Polls and Census has reported the following: As of 2002, about 10% of Nueva Germania's inhabitants were of mainly German origin.