The Guarani Culture: Language, People and Yerba Mate

Time to Read: 9 minutes

Picture a region of rocky jungle crisscrossed by rivers and full of wildlife, where heavy rainfall feeds dense forests and wonders like the Iguazu Falls. This is Guarani country, and the people who have lived here and protected it for centuries.

By “Guarani” we mean not only an Indigenous population that predates the conquest of America, but a living culture that has endured strongly into the 21st century. Their language, Guarani, is still spoken and taught across the region. In Paraguay it is an official language, and children grow up learning both Spanish and Guarani. That shared language is what binds together the many Guarani groups spread over thousands of kilometers.

Who are the Guarani people?

They are a resilient Indigenous people shaped by spirituality, courage, and tradition, who survived where many other nations did not. During the 17th century they endured the Spanish and Portuguese invasion, subjected to slavery and religious conversion, especially through the Jesuit missions. After the missions were expelled in the early 19th century, the Guarani focused on carrying their traditions forward and strengthening their communities.

Modern Guarani culture still carries ancient traditions, the best known being yerba mate. Beyond mate, it shows up in handicrafts: basketry, weaving, elaborate feather ornaments, and wood carvings of animals sold in shops and fairs around Misiones. Many Guarani in rural areas still live in simple wooden or brick homes and depend on agriculture, growing crops for the family or raising yerba mate, tea, and mandioca (cassava) for sale. Extended families often share a home across three generations, though younger people increasingly move to cities for work or school. Having re-emerged from long territorial struggles, the Guarani remain a vital part of the region's Indigenous culture.

Why has the Guarani language survived?

Because the people held on to it, and the land helped. Elsewhere on the continent, European languages drove Indigenous ones toward extinction. Paraguayan Guarani, by contrast, remains one of the country's main languages, and unusually, it is spoken largely by non-Indigenous people too.

Two things helped preserve it: the geographic isolation of thick jungle and difficult terrain, and the sheer loyalty of the people to their tongue. Spanish conquistadors recorded in their diaries that the Indigenous people refused to learn Spanish, so the rulers had to learn Guarani. Eventually the Spanish authorities accepted this, and Paraguay adopted two languages. Even outside the Guarani heartland, words coined centuries ago live on, like the fruit ananá and animals such as yacaré, jaguareté, and carpincho. Guarani culture is fundamentally oral, so the language is inseparable from the culture: preserving one means protecting the other.

What does yerba mate mean to the Guarani?

It was, in their words, a gift from the gods. You cannot talk about Guarani culture without the plant whose influence reached the whole world. Also called yerba de los Jesuitas or yerba del Paraguay, it grows wild through the region, filling the jungle with its aroma. There are three widespread ways to drink it:

• Mate: an infusion prepared in a gourd (also called a mate, or a wide-mouthed porongo), with hot water sipped through a bombilla.
• Tereré: like mate but made with very cold water or citrus juice, ice, and herbs. A drink for hot days.
• Mate cocido: a hot infusion strained and served in a cup, often first “burnt” with sugar. Today it is frequently made from tea bags.

Herbs and medicinal remedies like mint, cedron, or peperina are often added to any of these. The vocabulary of mate is Guarani through and through. The gourd is caiguá, from caa (herb), i (water), and gua (container): “the container for the water of the yerba.” The bombilla was tacuapí, named for the reed it was first made from, tipped with a woven fiber basket that acted as a filter. Even the kettle had a name, itacuguá, “container for hot water,” originally a clay pot rather than metal. As the locals say, mate “makes you talk if you are with someone, and makes you think when you are alone.”

Where did the mate round come from?

From the Guarani themselves, who were the first custodians of yerba mate. They drank its leaves, worshipped it, and traded it. In Guarani, caa means not just yerba but plant and forest too, so the meaning runs deep: the yerba mate tree was, above all, a gift from the gods.

The conquistadors then spread its use throughout the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, and the Jesuits introduced its cultivation in the reductions. That is how drinking mate became one of the few traditions to survive, largely unchanged, for centuries, taking root and spreading around the world, even to Poland and Syria.

Why is sharing mate a symbol of equality?

Because in Guarani culture, passing one gourd around a circle is a horizontal act: everyone drinks the same mate, and differences fall away. As the saying goes, “in front of the mate we are all equal.” In the isolated communities of the early 1800s, mate was one of the few things that cut across a society mixing Indigenous peoples and Europeans, a shared thread in a common identity, much like the poncho.

Travelers' accounts show mate crossing every social stratum: rich and poor, masters and slaves, natives and Spaniards, men and women, young and old, sometimes sharing the same gourd. Class showed not in whether you drank mate but in the extras: aristocrats added milk, cream, cinnamon, or cloves, and sent their gourds to Potosí to be worked in silver. The more ornate, the more refined it was considered.

What are the spiritual roots of mate?

The Guarani consider the yerba mate tree sacred, and its wood was sought for carving religious figures. This mystique is their inheritance. They built community life on reciprocity, on “giving to receive,” believing the richest person was not the one who accumulated the most but the one who shared, in material and spiritual goods alike.

So when they received the gift of yerba mate, they chose to share it, before the sacred fire, passing the gourd around the circle. As the locals put it, to cebar, to pour the hot water, is not the same as merely serving. It means to nourish, an act that carries love, care, and dedication. We still share mate in that spirit today, carrying forward the message of the Guarani people. You can read more about the etiquette in the dos and don'ts of drinking mate.

Drink to connect

Every round of mate carries the Guarani spirit of sharing. Explore our yerba mate and starter kits to join the tradition. #DrinkToConnect

Other articles you may enjoy

The History and Origins of Yerba Mate

The Colonial History of Yerba Mate

How to Prepare Tereré, Cold Mate