Jakob Unger Museum and Colony House Museum

A pair of small museums on the south side of the town centre that tell the story of the Mennonite colonisation of the Chaco. The Colony House Museum is a wooden settler's house preserved from the early years of the colony — sparse, austere, with a kitchen, a Plattdeutsch family Bible, and the agricultural tools the first arrivals had to invent uses for in this completely unfamiliar landscape.

The Jakob Unger natural-history museum next door, named after the Mennonite naturalist who founded it in 1955, has a substantial collection of mounted Chaco fauna, indigenous artefacts, and exhibits on local plants. Together the two museums take an hour and a half and are by far the best introduction you can get to this odd corner of the world.

things to do museum
A story
The first Fernheim settlers arrived in 1930 from Soviet Russia, where the Mennonites had lost their lands and religious freedoms in the aftermath of the revolution. They had been promised land in Paraguay's Chaco — but on arrival found a near-waterless thornscrub where the first wells took years to dig and where infant mortality in the first decade ran above one in three.