Lizza Bogado: The Life Story Behind Paraguay's Folk Singer

María Lizzarella Bogado Cubilla, known to audiences as Lizza Bogado, has spent more than four decades carrying the songs of Paraguay onto stages at home and abroad. She was born in Asunción on 20 February 1961, and her working life in music began in 1981, when she was named best soloist at the Festival de Ypacaraí, the leading folk festival of her country. From that night onward, she has been a singer, a songwriter and a defender of a tradition that is older than she is and larger than any one performer. Her repertoire is Paraguayan to its core, yet her career has taken her to Brazil, Argentina, Chile, the United States, Sweden, Spain, Belgium, Russia and Egypt. That range tells us something important: the music of a small country can travel a very long way when it is sung by someone who believes in it completely.

Lizza is not a pop star in the usual sense. She does not chase the sound of the moment, and she does not build her shows around spectacle. Her work is quieter and harder than that. She sings the guarania, the slow song form created in Paraguay in the early twentieth century, and the polca canción, the song-polka that carries so much of Paraguay’s romantic feeling. She sings in Spanish and in Guaraní, sometimes mixing the two in the way Paraguayans actually speak, a blend called jopara. She has also written her own songs, acted in theatre and zarzuela, and composed a song that became the anthem of Paraguay’s Bicentennial. She is, in short, an artist whose career is a kind of public service: keeping a country’s music alive by singing it, writing it, and carrying it to new listeners.

This is the story of how a girl from Asunción who first trained as a dancer became one of the great voices of Paraguay, and of what it has meant to spend a whole working life inside a folk tradition rather than beside it.

Asunción in 1961 and a Childhood That Began With Dance

Lizza Bogado was born in Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, on 20 February 1961. Asunción sits on the river Paraguay, and in the early 1960s it was a small capital by the standards of South America: a city of low buildings, wide skies, and a pace of life that left room for music in the evenings. A child growing up there would have heard Paraguayan music everywhere, at family gatherings, on the radio, and at the festivals that mark the year. The guarania and the polka were not museum pieces. They were the songs people sang when they were happy, when they were in love, and when they were far from home.

What is unusual about Lizza’s beginning is that she came to art first as a dancer, not as a singer. She has spoken of a real conflict in those early years, a moment when she had to choose between the path of dance and the path of singing. That choice matters, because it tells us that her career was not an accident. She had talent in more than one direction, and she had to decide which one to follow. She chose singing, and the dancer in her did not disappear. It stayed in the way she moves on stage, in the physical ease of her performances, and in the sense that her whole body is part of the song, not only her voice. A singer who has trained as a dancer understands rhythm differently. She feels it in her feet as well as in her throat, and that feeling shapes the way she phrases a melody.

Little is publicly recorded about the fine details of her school years, and it would be wrong to fill those gaps with invention. What the record does show is a young woman in Asunción who loved the arts enough to train seriously, who faced a genuine fork in the road between dance and song, and who chose the voice. That decision, made when she was still young, set the course of everything that followed. It also gave her a quality that audiences still notice: she performs a song as if she is inside it, not standing beside it, and that presence comes from a body that learned to move before it learned to sing.

The Festival de Ypacaraí and a First Record in 1981

The turning point came in 1981, when Lizza was twenty years old. She took part in the Festival de Ypacaraí, also known as the Festival del Lago, the main folk festival of Paraguay, held in the lakeside town of Ypacaraí. She was recognised as the best soloist of the festival, an award that carries real weight in Paraguay because the festival is the place where the country’s folk singers are judged by audiences who know the tradition deeply. To win there is not to impress a panel of strangers. It is to convince people who grew up with these songs that you understand them.

The same year, she recorded her first disc, Yo soy la morena, a song by Carlos Sosa. The title means I am the dark-haired woman, and the song became closely linked with her name. More than four decades later, in a celebration show in July 2026, she still opened her programme with Yo soy la morena, dressed in a white typói and a red skirt, singing it with the same energy she had brought to it at the start. That is a remarkable detail. Most singers move on from their first record and rarely look back. Lizza has kept hers at the centre of her work, as if to say that the beginning still matters, and that the song which introduced her to Paraguay still deserves the first place in the evening.

The festival prize and the first record together gave her a foundation. She was no longer a young woman choosing between dance and song. She was a folk singer with a public name, a record, and a prize that proved she could hold a stage. From that point on, her career had a direction, and it was a Paraguayan direction: folk festivals, theatre, recordings of the national repertoire, and a slow, steady building of a reputation based on craft rather than on sudden fame.

Theatre, Zarzuela, and Learning to Act a Song

In the years after her festival win, Lizza did something that many folk singers never do: she worked in theatre and in zarzuela, the Spanish-language form of musical theatre that has a long history in Paraguay. She took part in productions including Las Alegres Kygua Vera in 1981, Me llaman el Arribeño in 1982, and Vida y Muerte de Chirito Aldama in 1993. These were not side projects. They were a serious part of her training as a performer, and they shaped the way she sings to this day.

Zarzuela and musical theatre ask a singer to do more than produce a beautiful sound. They ask her to play a character, to tell a story with her body and her face as well as her voice, and to hold an audience’s attention across a whole evening rather than a single song. Lizza learned those skills on stage, and she carried them back into her concerts. Anyone who has seen her perform will recognise the difference. She does not simply stand and sing. She inhabits each song, she gives it a shape, and she lets the audience see the story as well as hear it. That theatrical sense is one of the reasons her concerts feel intimate even in a large hall.

The theatre years also connected her to a wider circle of Paraguayan artists: actors, musicians, composers and directors who shared her love of the national repertoire. A folk tradition does not survive on singers alone. It survives on the network of people who write, stage, play and teach it, and Lizza became part of that network early. Her work in zarzuela was not a detour from her folk career. It was a way of deepening it, of learning how a song works when it has to carry a story, and of understanding her own voice as an instrument of drama as well as of melody.

Records, Cassettes, and the Slow Building of a Repertoire

Through the 1980s, Lizza built her recorded repertoire steadily. Her second LP, Lizza Bogado Vol II, appeared in 1988, and it was followed by further recordings including Canto y plegaria, Dulce tierra mía, made with other artists, Lizza Bogado hacia el Sur in 1989, and Lizza Bogado, Recuerdos. Across her career she has released six discs and five cassettes of Paraguayan and international repertoire. Those numbers may sound modest beside the output of a pop star, but they reflect the economics of folk music in Paraguay. A folk singer records when the work is ready, not when a label demands a new product, and each record is a careful statement rather than a quick release.

The titles themselves tell a story. Canto y plegaria means song and prayer, and it points to the spiritual side of her music, the sense that a song can be an offering as well as an entertainment. Dulce tierra mía means my sweet land, and it points to the patriotic feeling that runs through her work, the love of Paraguay that is never far from the surface. Lizza Bogado hacia el Sur, towards the south, points to the journeys her career took her on, south to Argentina and beyond, carrying Paraguayan music to new audiences. Each title is a small clue to what she was thinking about when she made the record, and together they map a career that is rooted at home and open to the world.

One of the songs from this period deserves special attention. A veces quiero ser, released in 1985, is built on the six-by-eight rhythm of Paraguay, and its words speak of love and respect for others and for those we love. It is a gentle song, and it shows Lizza’s gift for choosing material that is both musical and humane. She has always been drawn to songs that say something kind about the world, and A veces quiero ser is an early example of that instinct. It is not a song that shouts. It is a song that asks the listener to be better, quietly, and that is a harder thing to write and to sing.

Becoming a Songwriter: Canto y Plegaria and the Words She Wrote

Lizza Bogado is not only an interpreter of other people’s songs. She is also a songwriter, and that side of her work began in earnest in 1983, when she wrote her first lyrics, for Canto y plegaria, with music by César Cataldo. The harpist Cataldo was an important figure in her life: she has recalled how he came to her house one day while they were rehearsing for a record she had asked him to help with, and how that collaboration led to a song that would become one of her most personal works. A first song is always a risk. A singer who writes her own words is putting her own thoughts in front of an audience, and there is nowhere to hide if the words are weak. Lizza took that risk, and the song has lasted.

Her songwriting did not become a flood. After that first lyric in 1983, she returned to writing in earnest in 2001, and in 2018 she released the album Esperanza y fe, meaning hope and faith, with sixteen songs, two of them co-written. That pattern tells us something about how she works. She does not write to fill a quota. She writes when she has something to say, and she gives each song the time it needs. She has spoken of wanting to take her time with her next eight songs, sitting with them as one sits in the afternoon with a coffee, watching the sunset, going into the interior of the country, connecting with silence and with the sounds of nature. That image is a good description of her whole approach to music: unhurried, attentive, and rooted in the quiet of Paraguay rather than in the noise of the industry.

The most widely known of her compositions is Un solo canto, a song she wrote that became the anthem of the Bicentennial of Paraguay, and which was widely shared on social media. For that work she received the Premio Nacional de Música in the popular category in 2023, one of the highest honours for a musician in her country. The song is a polca canción, and its words celebrate what it means to be Paraguayan. To write an anthem for a country’s two hundredth birthday is a responsibility few songwriters are ever given. It asks for a song that is grand enough for the occasion and simple enough for ordinary people to sing. Lizza wrote such a song, and the prize she received for it was a recognition not only of one composition but of more than forty years of work.

Two Languages in One Voice: Guaraní, Spanish, and Jopara

One of the most distinctive things about Lizza Bogado’s singing is the way she handles Paraguay’s two languages. Paraguay is the only country in Latin America that is completely bilingual, with Spanish and Guaraní both recognised as national languages, and its music reflects that fact. Lizza addresses her compositions in jopara, a mix of Guaraní and Spanish, and in jehe’a, a form in which the two languages sit side by side. Music in two languages that becomes one is common in most Paraguayan popular songs, and delivering it well is a rare skill. It is, as the Berklee College of Music put it when presenting her, her unique and striking talent.

To understand why this matters, it helps to know what Guaraní is. It is the indigenous language of Paraguay, spoken by most of the population alongside Spanish, and it carries a different music in its sounds: different vowels, different rhythms, different ways of shaping a phrase. A singer who sings in Guaraní is not only choosing different words. She is choosing a different sound, and she is honouring the indigenous roots of her country. Lizza sings in both languages, and she moves between them with an ease that comes from a lifetime of hearing them spoken together. That bilingual voice is part of what makes her a true voice of Paraguay, and it is part of why her work is valued by institutions like Berklee, which invited her to present the musicality of Paraguay in its two national languages.

Her repertoire reflects this bilingual world. She sings the great guaranias, the slow romantic songs that are the heart of Paraguayan music, and she sings the polca paraguaya, the faster, more joyful music that fills festivals and parties. She sings the songs of the great Paraguayan composers, and she sings her own compositions, in Spanish and in Guaraní, sometimes in the same song. For a listener who knows only one of the languages, the other may be a mystery, but the feeling comes through anyway. That is the point of her work: the music carries the meaning even when the words are unfamiliar, and the two languages together say something that neither could say alone.

Carrying Paraguay Abroad: Stages From Buenos Aires to Egypt

Lizza Bogado has represented Paraguay on stages in many countries, and the list of places she has performed in is striking: Brazil, Argentina, Chile, the United States, Sweden, Spain, Belgium, Russia and Egypt. That is not a list of easy bookings. It is a list that spans continents, climates and cultures, and it tells us that her music has been heard by audiences who knew nothing about Paraguay before she sang to them. A folk singer who travels that far is doing more than performing. She is acting as an ambassador, carrying her country’s sound to people who would otherwise never hear it.

Each of those journeys would have asked something different of her. In Argentina and Brazil, the audiences would have known something of Paraguayan music, and she would have been singing to neighbours. In Sweden or Russia or Egypt, the audiences would have known very little, and she would have been introducing a whole musical world from scratch. That takes a particular kind of confidence: the confidence to stand on a stage in a far country and sing in Guaraní, trusting that the beauty of the music will reach people who do not understand a word. Lizza has that confidence, and she has earned it over decades of performing.

The international work also shaped her musically. A singer who travels hears new sounds, meets new musicians, and brings those influences home. Lizza has explored Latin American rhythms beyond Paraguay’s borders, singing songs from across the region and giving them her own colour. In her 2026 celebration show, for example, she sang Gracias a la vida, Violeta Parra’s great Chilean song, in the rhythm of the landó, the Afro-Peruvian form that speaks of resistance and resilience. That choice shows a singer who is not locked inside one tradition. She honours her own music, and she also listens to the music of her neighbours, and she finds ways to bring the two together.

Encuentro, Pedro Martínez, and a New Sound for Old Songs

In 2021, Lizza celebrated forty years of her artistic career with a project that showed her at her most open and creative. Together with the Pedro Martínez Trío, she released a live album called Encuentro, meaning meeting, with works from the Paraguayan and Latin American songbook given what she described as a new sound. The trio was led by the guitarist, teacher and composer Pedro Martínez, with Chino Corvalán on bass and Gonzalo Resquín on drums, and the material was recorded live during a performance at AsuJazz 2019 in the Manzana de la Rivera in Asunción.

The story of how the project began is a good one. Pedro Martínez has said that when he was asked which singer he would most like to work with, he answered with Lizza Bogado’s name. From that answer came a concert called Aires nuevos, meaning new airs, which brought them together, and from that concert came the album. The songs on Encuentro include Pacholí by Eladio Martínez, Che rogamí by Hilarión Correa, Gracias a la vida by Violeta Parra, Canto y plegaria with music by César Cataldo and words by Lizza herself, and Marina, a composition by Pedro. The first single from the album, Ñasaindy Poty, a song by Teodoro S. Mongelós and Toledo Ñúnez, was released with a video directed by Guti González.

What makes Encuentro interesting is that it does not treat the old songs as relics. It gives them new arrangements, new colours, and a live energy that comes from musicians playing together in a room. The project took Lizza and the trio to stages in Paraguay and abroad, including the Usina del Arte in Buenos Aires and the Mario Vargas Llosa auditorium in Lima, and it showed that a folk singer in her sixties could still be experimenting, still be learning, and still be finding new ways to sing songs she had known for decades. That willingness to keep growing is one of the most admirable things about her career.

A Family on Stage, a Song for a Son, and a Life of Service

Lizza Bogado’s life has not been only about stages and records. It has also been about family and about service, and those two threads run through her story in ways that deserve to be told plainly. In 2014, when she presented her material Un solo canto in a gala at the Municipal Theatre in Asunción, she was joined on stage by her husband and her three children, who also took part in the recording. A family that sings together on a stage like that is a rare sight, and it tells us that music in her home is not a job she leaves at the door. It is a shared life, and her children have grown up inside it.

The same gala was held for a generous purpose. The money from ticket sales was given to help build a rehabilitation pool at CERENIF, the neurorehabilitation centre of the Fundación Solidaridad, where her son was receiving treatment after a traffic accident at the end of 2011. The money from record sales was given to projects of the Fundación Libre, where Lizza is a volunteer. These are private family matters, and they should be treated with respect rather than curiosity, but they are part of the public record, and they show a singer who has used her art to help others, including her own family, in difficult times. Music, for Lizza, has been what she herself has called her saving plank, the thing that kept her afloat, and she has used it to keep others afloat too.

Her commitment to service is also visible in the way she has spoken about her work over the years. In interviews she has described a career of more than forty years in which she has had everything: success, difficulty, joy and loss. She has spoken of the social commitment in her work, whether in songs that defend Paraguayan identity or in stories of everyday life told through music. That commitment is not a slogan. It is visible in the choices she has made: the folk repertoire she has defended, the languages she has sung in, the benefit concerts she has given, and the young audiences she has tried to reach. A singer who gives her life to a tradition is giving it to the people who own that tradition, and Lizza has done that with a consistency that is rare.

In July 2026, she marked more than forty-five years since her festival win with an intimate and energetic show that looked back across her career. The evening was built in four acts, with songs, dances and video images of her beginnings, and it closed with songs dedicated to her family, the foundation that has held her career up. She sang in French, Guaraní, English, Portuguese and Spanish that night, and she sang with the energy she had shown as a young woman in 1981. A career that ends its fifth decade with a show like that is not a career winding down. It is a career still being lived, still being sung, and still being shared.

My Take:

I want to start with the thing that struck me hardest about Lizza Bogado, which is that she chose a hard road and then walked it for more than forty years without turning back. Folk music is not the easy road. It does not bring quick fame, it does not bring big money, and it does not put a singer on the front of magazines. It asks for patience, for study, for respect, and for a willingness to serve a tradition that is bigger than you are. Lizza chose that road when she was twenty years old, at the Festival de Ypacaraí, and she has stayed on it ever since. I admire that more than I can easily say, because most people, given a choice between a hard road and an easy one, take the easy one. She took the hard one, and she made it her home.

What I love most about her story is the dance. She began as a dancer, and she had to choose between dance and song, and she chose song. I keep thinking about that choice, because it tells me she did not drift into singing. She weighed two loves against each other and picked one, knowing she would have to give up the other as a profession. That is a brave decision for a young person, and it is the kind of decision that shapes a whole life. I also think the dancer never really left her. When I read about her shows, with their four acts, their dances, their video images and their changes of costume, I see a performer who thinks in pictures as well as in sound. A singer who trained as a dancer knows that a song is not only something you hear. It is something you see, something you feel in your body, and Lizza brings that understanding to every stage she stands on.

The festival win in 1981 is the part of her story I return to again and again. To be named best soloist at the Festival de Ypacaraí is not a small thing. That festival is where Paraguay judges its folk singers, and the audience there knows the songs the way a farmer knows his land. They know every note, every word, every way a guarania should be sung, and they can tell in a moment whether a singer understands the tradition or is only borrowing it. Lizza convinced them. She was twenty years old, and she convinced the hardest audience in her country that she belonged. I think about the courage that must have taken. A young woman, standing alone on a stage in Ypacaraí, singing songs that older singers had made famous, and winning. That night made her career possible, and I am glad she still honours it. Opening her 2026 show with Yo soy la morena, the song of her first record, is a way of saying that she has not forgotten where she started. I respect that deeply. Too many successful people pretend they were always successful. Lizza keeps going back to the beginning, and that honesty is part of her strength.

Her songwriting moves me in a different way. She wrote her first lyrics in 1983, for Canto y plegaria, and then she waited, and wrote again, and in 2018 she released an album of sixteen songs called Esperanza y fe. Hope and faith. Those are not fashionable words. They are old words, and they are the words of a person who has lived long enough to know what hope costs. I like that she does not write in a hurry. She has said she wants to take her time with her next songs, to sit with a coffee in the afternoon, to watch the sunset, to go into the interior and listen to silence and to the sounds of nature. That is not how the music industry works, and I am glad she does not care. The industry wants a new song every month. Lizza wants a song that is worth singing, and she is willing to wait for it. That patience is a form of respect: respect for the song, respect for the listener, and respect for herself.

Un solo canto, the anthem she wrote for the Bicentennial of Paraguay, is the achievement I find hardest to put into words. To write the song for a country’s two hundredth birthday is an honour that most songwriters never come close to. It asks for something almost impossible: a song grand enough for a national celebration and simple enough for ordinary people to sing and remember. Lizza wrote it, and she won the National Music Prize for it in 2023, and I think that prize was overdue. It was not only a prize for one song. It was a prize for forty years of carrying Paraguay’s music, for singing in Guaraní and Spanish, for keeping the guarania and the polca alive, and for doing it all without ever making a fuss about it. A country that gives its highest music prize to a folk singer who has served its tradition for decades is a country that understands what matters. I am glad Paraguay did that.

The bilingual singing is something I want to dwell on, because it is the heart of what makes Lizza special. Paraguay is the only country in Latin America that is fully bilingual, and its music lives in two languages at once. Lizza sings in jopara, the mix of Guaraní and Spanish that Paraguayans actually speak, and in jehe’a, where the languages sit side by side. That is not a trick. It is the sound of a real place, a real people, and a real way of speaking. When she sings in Guaraní, she is honouring the indigenous language of her country, and she is keeping it alive in the ears of listeners who might otherwise forget it. When she sings in Spanish, she is reaching the wider world. When she mixes them, she is doing what Paraguayans do every day. I think that is beautiful, and I think it is important. Languages die when people stop singing in them, and Lizza has spent her life making sure Guaraní is sung, loudly and proudly, on stages at home and abroad.

I am also struck by her international career, and by the list of countries where she has performed: Brazil, Argentina, Chile, the United States, Sweden, Spain, Belgium, Russia and Egypt. I try to picture her in each of those places, singing in Guaraní to an audience that has never heard the language before, and I think about the faith that takes. It takes faith to believe that a song from Paraguay can move a listener in Stockholm or in Cairo, and Lizza has that faith. She has carried her country’s music across the world, and she has done it without changing it into something it is not. She did not water down the guarania to make it easier for foreign audiences. She sang it as it is, and she trusted the beauty of the music to do the work. That is what an ambassador does, and she has been a better ambassador for Paraguay than many diplomats.

The Encuentro project with Pedro Martínez is the part of her recent career that gives me the most pleasure. Here is a singer in her sixties, with forty years behind her, making a live album with a younger guitarist and his trio, giving old songs a new sound, and taking the result to Buenos Aires and Lima. That is not the behaviour of a singer who is resting on her past. It is the behaviour of a singer who is still curious, still learning, and still willing to be surprised by her own music. I love the story of how it began, with Pedro being asked which singer he most wanted to work with and answering with her name. That is the kind of respect that cannot be bought. It is earned over decades, and it is given freely by one musician to another. The album that came from it, recorded live at AsuJazz in 2019, is proof that folk music is not a museum. It is a living thing, and it grows when musicians meet and play together.

There is a quieter part of her story that I want to treat with care, and that is the family and the service. In 2014 she stood on the stage of the Municipal Theatre in Asunción with her husband and her three children, presenting Un solo canto, and the money from that night went to help build a rehabilitation pool for a centre where her son was being treated after a traffic accident. I do not want to dwell on the private pain of that, because it is her family’s pain, not mine to examine. But I do want to say that a singer who turns a gala into help for others, and who volunteers with the Fundación Libre, is a singer who understands that music is not only about applause. It is about what you do with the gift you have been given. Lizza has used her gift to help her family and her community, and she has called music her saving plank, the thing that kept her afloat. I believe her. Music has kept her afloat, and she has used it to keep others afloat too.

What can a reader learn from Lizza Bogado? I think the first lesson is about choosing the hard thing and staying with it. She chose folk music when she could have chosen something easier, and she stayed with it for more than forty years. That is not a career. That is a vocation, and it is worth thinking about the difference. A career is something you do for success. A vocation is something you do because it is yours to do, whether it brings success or not. Lizza’s life is a vocation, and it shows in everything she has done: the festival win, the records, the theatre, the songwriting, the travelling, the teaching by example. She did not do those things to become famous. She did them because the music of Paraguay needed someone to do them, and she was the person who stepped forward.

The second lesson is about patience in making things. She wrote her first lyrics in 1983, she wrote again in 2001, and in 2018 she released an album of sixteen songs. She wants to take her time with her next eight songs, to sit and listen and wait. In a world that rewards speed, that patience looks strange, and I think it is one of the most valuable things about her. A song that is made slowly, with attention and care, will last longer than a song that is made in a hurry. Lizza’s songs have lasted because she gave them time, and that is a lesson for anyone who makes anything: give it time, give it attention, and do not rush it into the world before it is ready.

The third lesson is about language and identity. Lizza sings in Guaraní and in Spanish, and she mixes them in the way her people speak. She does not apologise for Guaraní, and she does not hide it. She puts it on stage in front of audiences in Sweden and Egypt and Russia, and she sings it proudly. That is a lesson for anyone whose language or culture is small in the eyes of the world. Your language is not a weakness. It is a treasure, and the way to keep it alive is to sing in it, to speak it, to teach it, and to carry it with you wherever you go. Lizza has done that for her whole career, and Guaraní is stronger for it.

The fourth lesson is about growing older as an artist. Lizza is in her sixties now, and she is still learning, still collaborating, still singing in five languages in a single evening, still opening her shows with the song of her first record and still finding new ways to sing it. She has not retired into nostalgia. She has not decided that her best years are behind her. She is still working, still experimenting, and still performing with the energy she had at twenty. That is a model for ageing that I find hopeful. Growing older does not have to mean growing smaller. It can mean growing deeper, and Lizza’s career shows what that looks like: more languages, more collaborators, more songs, and more generosity with the gift she has been given.

If I could ask Lizza one question, I would ask her what she felt on the night she won at Ypacaraí in 1981. Not what the prize meant for her career, but what it felt like in the moment, standing on that stage, hearing her name, knowing that the hardest audience in Paraguay had chosen her. I think her answer would tell us something about the beginning of a vocation, about the moment when a young woman knows that the hard road she has chosen is the right one. I think she would remember it clearly, because a night like that does not fade. It stays with a singer for the rest of her life, and it gives her something to return to whenever the road gets hard.

In the end, I think Lizza Bogado’s story is a story about a voice that belongs to a country, and about a woman who has spent her life making sure that country can hear itself. She sings the guarania and the polca, she sings in Guaraní and in Spanish, she writes songs and she acts in theatre, she travels the world and she comes home, and she does it all with a patience and a devotion that are rare in any age. Paraguay is lucky to have her, and the world is richer for having heard her. When I think of her, I do not think of a star. I think of a keeper, a person who keeps a tradition alive by living inside it, and who passes it on by singing it, one song at a time, for more than forty years.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did Lizza Bogado start her singing career?

Lizza Bogado started her career in 1981, when she was named best soloist at the Festival de Ypacaraí, the leading folk festival in Paraguay. In the same year she recorded her first disc, Yo soy la morena, a song by Carlos Sosa. She had first trained as a dancer, and the festival win marked her decision to make singing her profession.

What is Lizza Bogado’s full name and when was she born?

Her full name is María Lizzarella Bogado Cubilla, and she was born in Asunción, Paraguay, on 20 February 1961. She performs under the name Lizza Bogado, and her career in music has lasted for more than forty years, from 1981 to the present day.

Which languages does Lizza Bogado sing in?

Lizza Bogado sings in Spanish and in Guaraní, the two national languages of Paraguay, and she often mixes them in jopara, the blend Paraguayans use in everyday speech. In a single show she has sung in French, Guaraní, English, Portuguese and Spanish. Her bilingual singing is one of the most distinctive parts of her art.

What is Un solo canto, and why does it matter?

Un solo canto is a song written by Lizza Bogado that became the anthem of the Bicentennial of Paraguay. It is a polca canción whose words celebrate Paraguayan identity, and it was widely shared on social media. For this work she received the Premio Nacional de Música in the popular category in 2023.

Did Lizza Bogado work in theatre as well as music?

Yes, she worked in theatre and zarzuela in the years after her festival win, taking part in productions such as Las Alegres Kygua Vera in 1981, Me llaman el Arribeño in 1982, and Vida y Muerte de Chirito Aldama in 1993. The stage work taught her to act a song as well as sing it, and it shaped the theatrical quality of her concerts.

What is the Encuentro album with Pedro Martínez?

Encuentro is a live album Lizza Bogado made with the Pedro Martínez Trío, recorded at AsuJazz 2019 in Asunción and released in 2021 to mark forty years of her career. It gives new arrangements to songs from the Paraguayan and Latin American songbook, including Pacholí, Che rogamí, Gracias a la vida, and her own Canto y plegaria. The project also took them to stages in Buenos Aires and Lima.

Where has Lizza Bogado performed outside Paraguay?

She has performed in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, the United States, Sweden, Spain, Belgium, Russia and Egypt, representing Paraguay on stages across South America, North America and Europe, and in Africa and the Middle East as well. Her international work has carried Paraguayan folk music to audiences who might otherwise never have heard it.

What are Lizza Bogado’s best-known recordings?

Her first disc, Yo soy la morena from 1981, remains one of her signature songs, and she still opens shows with it. Other important recordings include her second LP Lizza Bogado Vol II from 1988, Canto y plegaria, Dulce tierra mía, Lizza Bogado hacia el Sur from 1989, the 2018 album Esperanza y fe with sixteen songs, and the 2021 live album Encuentro with Pedro Martínez Trío.