Queen Letizia is in Paraguay for the sixth cooperation trip she has undertaken since becoming Queen back in 2014.
On the first day, she fulfilled her diplomatic duties, with the official welcome at the airport and the reception she was granted at the Presidential Palace in Asunción with president Abdo Benítez.
On the second day, which fell on the 3rd of November, Her Majesty arrived at the Technical Office of Cooperation, where she held a meeting that saw interventions that ranged in topic from gender equality to access to clean water, from hunger to education, as well as retracing the history of the Office and of its personnel.
Following the meeting, Her Majesty visited the permanent photographic exhibition that the building houses and took a group photograph with members of the staff at the Technical Office of Cooperation.
It was then time for the Queen to take the trip to Encarnación, 289 kilometres (or 179 miles) south of Asunción, where she visited the Centre for Total Attention to Women’s Health, a centre that benefits from the Spanish-Paraguayan cooperation. The centre tries to bring care to women experiencing cervical or breast cancer, focussing their attention specifically on women from the most vulnerable communities, such as rural areas or indigenous tribes.
In Spain, Queen Letizia has long been a champion of women’s health and cancer awareness, so this engagement was a window into the reality of healthcare in other contexts.
Following this visit, Her Majesty popped by the Taller School, which teaches cooking, restoring and house building to young people in vulnerable situations to better their quality of life and potentially offering them an alternative to life on the streets and recruitment from criminal organisations or groups.
In the afternoon, Queen Letizia changed cities once again and travelled the 27 kilometres (or 17 miles) north-east to Trinidad, where she stopped to see the work of the Jesuit missions of Trinidad del Paraná and Jesús de Tavarengue.
There, after maintaining a short meeting with the authorities that welcomed her to the complex, she heard from staff members about the spread of missionaries from those complexes around the world and how the Spanish cooperation effort was making a difference in building accessibility in the Jesús de Tavarengue complex.
The Jesuit missions are an essential part of the tourism industry of the area. The cooperation project with the Spanish government has allowed them over the last few years to make sure that people with disabilities can go down the same routes that others do, that panels are also available in Braille and that facilities such as ticket booths and bathrooms are accessible for disabled people.
To end her day, Queen Letizia travelled back to Asunción, where she held a meeting with staff from the Spanish Cooperation infrastructure at the Spanish Embassy in Paraguay.
The trip will conclude tomorrow, with her Majesty expected to resume her duties the following Monday.
