Sugar Mill Town · Raw Cane Sugar Block
Rapadura
Photo: Moacir Ximenes / Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
Guairá is one of Paraguay's main sugarcane departments, and small family trapiches still boil cane juice in open pans to make rapadura by hand.
Raw sugarcane juice is boiled down and poured into molds to harden into solid blocks, sold whole or broken into chunks at Guairá's markets. It's nibbled on its own or dissolved into hot water and mate.
Why it's made this way: Guairá department's sugar-processing history, centered on Villarrica's mills, made rapadura a defining local product of the region.
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