Qualla: Doctor Moisés Bertoni

Doctor Moisés Bertoni: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On a single day in July 1931, a small Paraguayan town stopped being a railway stop and became a monument. By presidential decree, Estación Sosa, founded around 1880 between Caazapá and Yuty, was renamed Doctor Moisés Bertoni, in honor of a man who had never run for office, founded no dynasty, and died two years earlier in poverty across the country. He was a Swiss botanist who had spent decades in the forests of eastern Paraguay, and the country chose to remember him by hanging his name on a town.

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Doctor Moisés Bertoni: The Naturalist Behind the Name

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Moisés Santiago Bertoni was born in 1857 in Lottigna, in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino, and studied at the universities of Geneva and Zurich. In 1884 he sailed for South America with his family and a band of fellow idealists, intent on building a colony around anarc...

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Doctor Moisés Bertoni: Stevia, Yerba Mate, and a Pauper's Death

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bertoni's name endures in the things he was the first to describe. Researching in eastern Paraguay in 1899, he became the first scientist to formally document Stevia rebaudiana, the unassuming herb whose leaves are reputed to be hundreds of times sweeter than sugar and which now ...

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Doctor Moisés Bertoni: Life Along the Tebicuary

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The town that carries his name sits about 260 kilometers from Asunción, in green, rain-fed country where the land tilts gently toward the Paraná. Low hills of red sandstone give way to marshy esteros thick with palms, drained by the Ypety and Tebicuary rivers and their smaller br...

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Doctor Moisés Bertoni: From Sosa Station to a Scientist's Name

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The town began as a creature of the railway. Founded around 1880 as Estación Sosa, it grew at a stop on the line that once stitched together the towns between Caazapá and Yuty, the kind of place that lived by the rhythm of arriving and departing trains. The decision to rename it ...

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