San José de los Arroyos

San José de los Arroyos is a town in the Caaguazú Department of Paraguay. It is located 100 km to the east of Asuncion on a branch of the Pan-american highway, "Ruta #2". The county comprises an urban area of around 8,000 inhabitants and some twelve smaller satellite villages or dependencies known as "colonias" raising its population to roughly 20,000 inhabitants. Although there is some controversy regarding its foundation, the official version is that it was founded by a former governor of Paraguay, Don Pedro Melo de Portugal on March 19, 1780, still during the time of Spanish colonialism and later elevated to a municipality in 1884. Like most towns in Paraguay with few exceptions, the colonial architecture survived until the early 1980s when, due to a lack of protective laws, it suffered a massive destruction and replacement by generic modern structures. It comprises an 887 km2 surface and topographically has two remarkably different types of terrain. The colonies to the west of the town are mostly formed by mild slopes with very fertile land adequate for cultivation of most agricultural products such as cotton, cassava, tobacco, soybean, sugarcane and some grains