Perla: The Life Story Behind Paraguay's Romantic Voice

Some voices do not need a loud arrangement to be remembered. Perla, whose real name is Ermelinda Pedroso Rodríguez D’Almeida, built a career of more than fifty years on a soft, tender way of singing about love. She was born in Paraguay, she found her first big audience in Brazil, and her records travelled far beyond both countries. People who heard her once often remembered the feeling of her singing long after they had forgotten the name of the record. That is a rare kind of fame. It does not depend on one season or one fashion. It depends on a voice that sounds honest when it sings about the heart.

Her name is linked most often with one recording: her Portuguese version of the ABBA song Fernando, released in 1976 on the album Palavras de Amor. That record made her known across Brazil, and it still follows her wherever her story is told. Yet to describe Perla only through that one song would miss most of her life. She sang guaranias and boleros, she recorded in Spanish, Portuguese, English and Italian, and she kept working through decades when the music business changed again and again around her. Brazilian and Paraguayan media have credited her with sales of more than ten million records, along with ten gold records, two platinum records and a double platinum record. Those numbers are reported widely, and they tell us how large her audience once was. The human story behind them is smaller and more interesting: a girl from a musical family in a Paraguayan town who crossed a border, learned a new music market from the inside, and stayed true to a romantic style that never really went out of date.

What follows is that story, from Caacupé to the nightclubs of Santos, from the first records to the honours she received at home in Paraguay, and from the years of success to the harder years that came later. It is a story about a singer who belonged to two countries at once, and about what it costs to keep singing when the spotlight moves on.

Caacupé, a Musical Family, and a Name That Means Pearl

Ermelinda Pedroso Rodríguez D’Almeida was born on 17 March 1952 in Caacupé, a town in the Cordillera department of Paraguay. Caacupé is known across the country as a place of pilgrimage, a town people travel to for faith and for the church at its centre. For a child growing up there in the 1950s, the town would have felt both small and full of sound: church bells, festivals, neighbours singing, and music drifting from homes and gatherings. Perla was born into a family of musicians, and that mattered more than the size of the town. In a musical family, a child does not have to go looking for music. Music is already in the house, in the evenings, in the work of the day, in the voices of the people she loves.

Before she ever sang alone, Perla performed with her father and her siblings in a family group called Las Maravillas del Paraguay. The name means the marvels of Paraguay, and it tells us something about how the family saw itself. They were not a group that happened to sing together once. They were a family act, travelling and performing as a unit, with a young girl learning her trade in the most practical way possible: on stage, in front of real audiences, alongside the people who knew her best. A child who learns to sing that way learns things no classroom can teach. She learns how to hold a room, how to listen to the other voices around her, how to recover when something goes wrong, and how to make an audience feel welcome rather than lectured.

The stage name she later chose, Perla, means pearl in Spanish. It is a short name, easy to remember, and it fits the quality people hear in her voice: something smooth, clear and precious, without any sharp edges. She is also known as Perla Paraguaia, a name that keeps her Paraguayan roots in front of Brazilian audiences. Names like that are not accidents. They are choices, and they tell an audience who a singer is before she sings a single note. In Perla’s case the name promised something gentle and beautiful, and her singing kept that promise for decades.

Little is publicly known in fine detail about her school years, and it would be wrong to invent a childhood that the record does not support. What the record does support is the shape of it: a Paraguayan childhood inside music, a family that sang together, and a girl whose voice was trained by performance rather than by theory alone. That beginning explains a great deal about the singer she became. She never sounded like someone who had learned romance from a book. She sounded like someone who had grown up hearing it sung at home.

Crossing Into Brazil and Singing in the Nightclubs of Santos

Perla moved to Brazil in the early 1970s, while she was still a young woman, and she later settled in Santos, a port city in the state of São Paulo. The move was a brave one. Paraguay and Brazil share a border and a long history, but their music industries were very different in size. Brazil had the studios, the record companies, the television shows and the audiences that a singer from a small Paraguayan town could only dream about. It also had a language difference to cross, a new city to learn, and a crowded field of singers competing for the same stages. Perla went anyway, because the opportunity was there, and because staying at home would have meant a much smaller life in music.

In Santos she began performing in nightclubs, and one of the places named in accounts of this period is a nightclub called O Bigode do Meu Tio, which means the moustache of my uncle. A nightclub in a port city is a hard school for a singer. The audience is close, the room is noisy, people are drinking and talking, and a performer who cannot hold attention will lose it in minutes. Perla learned to hold it with softness rather than volume. She sang romantic songs in a way that made a busy room go quiet, and that is a skill that cannot be faked. It comes from control, from knowing exactly where to place each note, and from trusting the song instead of shouting over the crowd.

These early Brazilian years also shaped the kind of singer she would be. She did not arrive as a star and she did not become one overnight. She worked the rooms, she learned what Brazilian audiences liked, and she built a repertoire that mixed the music of her Paraguayan home with the romantic songs Brazilians loved. Guaranias, the slow romantic song form of Paraguay, sat beside boleros, the romantic ballad form loved across Latin America. That mixture became her signature. It gave her a sound that was Paraguayan in its roots and Brazilian in its reach, and it meant she could sing to audiences on both sides of the border without sounding like a visitor in either place.

Moving country is never only a career decision. It is a life decision, and it asks a person to build a new home while keeping the old one alive in her heart. Perla did that for the rest of her career. She lived and worked in Brazil, she sang in Portuguese as well as Spanish, and she remained, in the eyes of Paraguay, one of its own. That double belonging would become one of the most interesting things about her: not quite a Brazilian singer, not only a Paraguayan singer, but a singer who carried both countries in her voice.

Fernando, Palavras de Amor, and a Breakthrough in 1976

By the middle of the 1970s, Perla had developed a repertoire that ranged from guaranias and boleros to Portuguese-language versions of foreign pop songs. This was a clever and natural direction for her. The 1970s were a decade when songs crossed borders more easily than ever, carried by radio, television and records, and a singer who could take a famous melody and make it sound like her own had a real advantage. Perla could do that because her voice was so distinctive. When she sang someone else’s song, it stopped sounding like a copy and started sounding like a Perla song.

In 1976 she gained national recognition in Brazil with her version of Fernando, the ABBA song, included on the RCA album Palavras de Amor. The album title means words of love, and it suited the record perfectly. Her Fernando was sung in Portuguese, and it caught the mood of the moment: a gentle, nostalgic song about two old friends remembering their youth, sung by a voice that made the memory feel personal. ABBA’s original was already famous around the world, and a good version in Portuguese gave Brazilian listeners a way into the song in their own language. Perla’s version did more than translate the words. It gave the song a warmth and a softness that made it hers.

The success of Fernando changed the scale of her career. A nightclub singer becomes a recording artist with a hit, and suddenly the audience is not one room in Santos but a whole country. Radio played the song, people bought the album, and Perla’s name began to be known far beyond the places she had performed in person. For a singer from Caacupé, that must have felt extraordinary: a song written in Sweden, made famous by a Swedish group, carried by a Paraguayan voice into Brazilian homes. Music really does travel like that, and Perla was living proof of it.

It is worth pausing on why Fernando suited her so well. The song is not about loud passion. It is about memory, about looking back, about a friendship that has lasted through the years. Perla’s voice was made for that kind of material. She never needed to push a song to make it emotional. She could sing quietly and let the listener come to her, and in Fernando the listener had a reason to come: a melody everyone already loved, delivered by a voice that sounded as if it understood every word. That combination is what turns a cover version into a career-defining record, and it is what happened for Perla in 1976.

A Repertoire in Four Languages and a String of Records

After Fernando, Perla kept recording and performing, and her career took on the shape of a long working life in music rather than a short burst of fame. Through her career she recorded songs in Spanish, Portuguese, English and Italian, which is a remarkable range for any singer. Each language asks something different of a voice. Spanish gives a singer clear vowels and a direct emotional line. Portuguese gives a softer, more flowing sound, with its own rhythms and colours. English and Italian open different audiences and different kinds of songs. Perla sang in all four, and that range tells us she was not a singer who relied on one trick. She was a singer who could adapt, and who wanted her music to reach as many people as possible.

Her selected discography shows the steady pace of her recording life. She released an album called Perla on RCA in 1975, followed by Palavras de Amor in 1976, the album that carried Fernando. Another album called Perla followed on RCA in 1979, a record that featured disco-influenced arrangements, including a version of Love Is in the Air. That detail matters, because it shows Perla responding to the sound of the late 1970s. Disco was everywhere, and a romantic singer who ignored it risked sounding old-fashioned. Perla did not ignore it. She took a disco song and sang it in her own way, keeping her identity while moving with the times.

Another recording closely linked with her name is Pequenina, her version of ABBA’s Chiquitita. Pequenina means little one, and the song is a gentle, comforting piece, a friend telling a sad girl that things will get better. It suited Perla’s voice in the same way Fernando did, and it became one of the songs audiences associated most strongly with her. Together with Fernando and her later hit Comienza amanecer, these three songs form the core of the Perla repertoire in the public mind: three songs about memory, comfort and love, sung by a voice that makes each one feel like it was written for the listener alone.

The sales figures reported for her career are large: more than ten million records sold, with ten gold records, two platinum records and a double platinum record among her awards. These figures come from Brazilian and Paraguayan media, and they should be read as the public record of a very successful recording career rather than as a precise audit. What they clearly show is that Perla was not a singer with one lucky record. She was a singer whose records sold in large numbers over many years, across more than one country, and that kind of success is earned by consistency as much as by talent.

Comienza Amanecer and the Song That Spoke to Many Women

If Fernando made Perla famous, another song made her deeply loved. Her greatest success, according to accounts of her career, came with the song Comienza amanecer, which means the dawn begins. The song dates from 1981, and its subject is one that many women recognised at once: a woman living with a husband’s infidelity, facing the morning after a night of hurt, and finding the strength to carry on. It is a song about pain, but it is also a song about dignity, and that combination is part of why it connected so strongly.

A song like Comienza amanecer works only if the singer is believed. A listener has to feel that the woman singing understands the story she is telling, that she is not acting a part but speaking from the heart. Perla was believed, and the song became one of the defining recordings of her career. Women who had lived through something similar heard their own experience in it, and they kept the record, played it, and passed it on. That is the kind of success that does not show up fully in a chart position. It shows up in the way a song becomes part of people’s lives, played at difficult moments, sung along to in kitchens and living rooms, remembered decades later.

The song also shows a different side of Perla from the gentle nostalgia of Fernando. Comienza amanecer is a song about a hard truth, and singing it well requires courage as well as tenderness. Perla brought both. She did not make the song bitter, and she did not make it sentimental. She sang it plainly, with the warmth that was her trademark, and she let the story do its work. That restraint is what makes the recording last. A song that shouts its emotion can tire a listener quickly. A song that holds its emotion, and lets the listener feel it for herself, can be played for a lifetime.

Alongside her recordings, Perla remained active through the 1980s and 1990s with live performances, television appearances and further records. She appeared at the Viña del Mar International Song Festival in Chile, one of the most important music festivals in Latin America, and she served as a juror at its 1984 edition. To be asked to judge at Viña del Mar is a mark of respect from the music world. It says that a singer’s ear is trusted, that her judgement carries weight, and that she is seen as part of the festival’s tradition rather than only as a passing guest. For Perla, whose career had been built on the road and in the studio, it was a public sign of how far she had come from the nightclubs of Santos.

Later Records, New Generations, and a Surprise Return

Perla did not stop recording when the 1980s ended. She released Especialmente para você in 1999, a title that means especially for you, and in 2002 a compilation called Perla canta ABBA e outros hits was prepared by the Brazilian music researcher Rodrigo Faour. The compilation gathered her recordings of ABBA songs and other international hits, and its existence says something important: by 2002, Perla’s versions of those songs were already being treated as a body of work worth collecting and revisiting. A compilation is a kind of verdict. It says that these recordings mattered, that they belong together, and that new listeners should hear them as a group. For a singer whose biggest hits were versions of other people’s songs, that verdict was a generous one, and it was deserved.

The years that followed brought the changes every long career brings. The music business moved from records to CDs to streaming, audiences grew younger, and the romantic ballad style that had made Perla famous was no longer the sound of the moment. She kept performing and recording when she could, and she remained a known name in Brazil and Paraguay, even as the scale of her fame changed. That is the normal shape of a long career in popular music. Very few singers stay at the top forever. The test is not whether the spotlight stays. The test is whether the singer keeps her craft, her audience and her dignity when it moves on, and Perla kept all three.

Then, in 2024, came a surprise that connected her to a new generation. Perla joined the Brazilian singer Ana Castela on a recording of Mercedita for Castela’s project Herança Boiadeira, Volume 1. Ana Castela is a much younger star, and a collaboration like this works in both directions: the younger singer gains the weight of a respected elder, and the elder singer reaches listeners who were not born when Fernando was a hit. Mercedita is a classic song of the region, and hearing Perla’s voice beside Ana Castela’s was a reminder that a great voice does not belong to one decade. It belongs to anyone who is ready to listen.

Moments like that are precious in a long career, because they show that the work is still alive. Perla was not being remembered only as a name from the 1970s. She was singing again, on a new record, with a new audience, and her voice was still recognisably hers. For the listeners who had loved her for decades, it must have felt like a gift. For younger listeners hearing her for the first time, it was an introduction to a singer they might otherwise never have found.

Honours at Home and the Harder Years

In June 2018, the Chamber of Deputies of Paraguay awarded Perla the Orden Nacional al Mérito Comuneros, in recognition of her career as a singer and her international prominence. It was a formal honour from her own country, and it mattered for a singer who had spent most of her working life abroad. Paraguay was saying, in the most official way it could, that Perla belonged to it, that her success in Brazil was also Paraguay’s success, and that the girl from Caacupé had carried her country’s name with honour. She was also honoured with a concert, and the occasion was covered as a homecoming as much as an award.

In November 2025, the Chamber of Deputies presented her with the Premio Emiliano R. Fernández, in recognition of her contribution to Paraguayan culture and her career. The award is named after one of Paraguay’s great popular poets and musicians, and receiving it placed Perla in a line of artists who have shaped the country’s music. Two honours from the same institution, seven years apart, tell a clear story: Paraguay did not forget her, and it did not treat her as a singer who had left and never looked back. It treated her as one of its own, and it kept saying so.

The later years of Perla’s life have also included real hardship, and an honest life story should not hide that. She married a Brazilian who was her employer, and she has an adopted daughter named Perlinha, who has tried her own singing career, and a granddaughter. Reports in Paraguayan media have described economic problems in her older age, and a Paraguayan television programme called Domingo Show showed her house in a state of neglect, a house she had bought with the money she earned. These reports are painful to read, and they should be read with care rather than curiosity. A singer who once sold millions of records can still face a difficult old age, and that fact says more about how the music business treats its older artists than it does about any one person.

It is important to be fair here. The details of a person’s private finances are not a matter for gossip, and the record does not give a full picture of her circumstances. What is clear is that Perla’s later life has not been an easy victory lap. It has included the honours and the respect of her country, and it has also included the kind of struggle that many older performers face when the big fees stop coming and the royalties thin out. Both parts of that story are true, and both belong in her life story. A singer’s legacy is not only the records she sold. It is also the way she is remembered, and Paraguay’s decision to honour her twice suggests that her country remembers her with gratitude.

My Take:

I have spent a long time thinking about Perla’s story, and the first thing I want to say is that it is a story about belonging to two places at once. She was born in Paraguay, she became famous in Brazil, and she never fully belonged to only one of them. That sounds like a small detail, but I think it is the heart of her whole life. Most of us belong to one town, one country, one language, and we take that for granted. Perla had to carry two countries in her voice, and she had to make audiences in both of them feel that she was theirs. She did it, and she did it for more than fifty years. That takes a kind of quiet strength that is easy to miss, because it does not look like courage from the outside. It looks like singing softly. But it is courage all the same.

What I admire most about her is the way she trusted softness. In a music world that often rewards the loudest voice in the room, Perla built a career on being gentle. Her Fernando is not a performance that shouts at you. It is a performance that invites you closer. Her Comienza amanecer does not hammer its subject into the listener. It tells a painful story plainly, and it trusts the listener to feel it. I think that is a harder way to sing, because there is nowhere to hide. A loud singer can hide behind volume. A soft singer has to be exact, and Perla was exact. Every note had to be in the right place, every word had to be clear, and every breath had to serve the song. That is craft, and I respect craft more than almost anything in music.

I also think about the nightclubs of Santos, because that is where her career was really made, long before the records sold in millions. A young woman from a small Paraguayan town, singing in a noisy room in a port city, learning to make people stop talking and listen. There is something honest about that beginning. She did not start at the top. She started where working singers start, in rooms where nobody owes you their attention, and she earned it one song at a time. When I read that she performed in a place called O Bigode do Meu Tio, I do not think of glamour. I think of a working singer doing her job, night after night, and getting better at it. That is the part of a music career that the hit records hide, and it is the part I find most impressive.

The Fernando story teaches me something about how music travels. A song written in Sweden, sung by a Swedish group, becomes a hit in Brazil because a Paraguayan woman sings it in Portuguese. That should not work on paper, and yet it did, beautifully. It worked because the feeling of the song was bigger than any one language or country. Fernando is about memory and old friendship, and those things exist everywhere. Perla understood that, and she sang the song as if it were about her own memories. I think that is what a great interpreter does. She does not just repeat a melody. She finds the human feeling inside it and brings it out for a new audience. Perla did that again and again, with Fernando, with Pequenina, with Love Is in the Air, and with Comienza amanecer. She was not only a singer. She was a translator of feeling, and that is a rare gift.

There is a sadder side to her story, and I do not want to look away from it. The reports of economic hardship in her later years, and the television images of a house she bought with her own earnings falling into neglect, are painful to think about. A woman who sold more than ten million records should not have to worry about money in her old age. That is not a judgement on her. It is a judgement on a music business that has always been better at making stars than at looking after them. I think about how many singers of her generation have faced the same thing: big years, big sales, and then a slow fading, with the money thinning out and the attention moving to younger names. It is not fair, and it is not new, and it is worth saying plainly. Perla’s story is not only a story of success. It is also a warning about what success in popular music is worth when the moment passes.

And yet the honours from Paraguay give the story a better ending than it might have had. The Orden Nacional al Mérito Comuneros in 2018 and the Premio Emiliano R. Fernández in 2025 are not just medals. They are a country telling one of its daughters that she is remembered, that her work mattered, and that she is still part of the national story. I find that moving, because it is the opposite of the music business forgetting her. It is her home country refusing to forget. For a singer who spent most of her working life in another country, that recognition must have meant a great deal. It is one thing to be loved by audiences. It is another thing to be honoured by the parliament of your own country, twice, years apart. That says her legacy is secure in the place where it started, and that matters more than any chart position.

I also admire the fact that Perla sang in four languages. That is not a small achievement. Most singers are comfortable in one language, and many struggle in a second. Perla recorded in Spanish, Portuguese, English and Italian, and she made each of them sound natural. I think that tells us something about how she listened. A singer who can sing in four languages is a singer who listens carefully to the sound of words, to the shape of a vowel, to the rhythm of a sentence. She was not just singing notes. She was shaping language into music, and she did it across borders that most people never cross. That is the same skill that let her move from Paraguay to Brazil and make a home there. She listened, she learned, and she adapted without losing herself.

The collaboration with Ana Castela in 2024 is the part of her story that gives me the most hope. A singer in her seventies, joining a much younger star on a recording of Mercedita, and reaching a new audience in the process. I love that, because it shows that a voice does not have an expiry date. It shows that a younger generation can still hear what an older singer has to offer, and that the older singer is still willing to sing. Too often we treat older artists as if they belong only in the past, as if their job is to be remembered rather than to keep working. Perla’s 2024 recording says the opposite. It says that she is still here, still singing, and still able to touch listeners who were not alive when she was at her peak. That is a beautiful thing, and I hope it is not the last time it happens.

What can a reader learn from Perla’s life? I think the first lesson is about patience. She did not become famous in a week. She sang with her family, she moved to a new country, she worked the nightclubs, she built a repertoire, and then, in 1976, a record caught fire. The success looked sudden from the outside, but it was the result of years of work that nobody saw. That is how most real success happens, and it is worth remembering when we look at famous people and wonder why it has not happened for us yet. It has not happened yet because the groundwork is still being laid, and Perla’s story shows what groundwork looks like: small rooms, long nights, and a voice getting better every year.

The second lesson is about staying true to a style. Perla could have chased every fashion that came along. She could have abandoned the romantic ballad for something louder or trendier. She did try new sounds, as the disco-influenced record of 1979 shows, but she never abandoned the gentle, romantic core of her singing. She trusted that love songs would always have an audience, because people would always fall in love, lose love, and remember love. She was right. Fashions change, but the feelings she sang about do not, and that is why her records still mean something to people who hear them for the first time today.

The third lesson is about home. Perla left Paraguay, but she never left it behind. She carried its music with her, she sang its guaranias in Brazil, and she was honoured by it twice in her later years. I think that is a lesson for anyone who has moved away from home for work, which is a great many people in the world today. You can build a life in a new place without erasing the old one. You can belong to two places, and you can be proud of both. Perla did that, and her country thanked her for it. That is a model worth following.

I also want to say something about Comienza amanecer, because it is the song that stays with me most. A song about a woman facing a husband’s infidelity is not an easy song to sing, and it is not an easy song to hear. But Perla sang it with dignity, and she gave a voice to women who had lived through that pain and had no song of their own. I think that is one of the most important things a singer can do: give words and melody to a feeling that people carry in silence. When a listener hears her own story in a song, she feels less alone, and that is a real gift. Perla gave that gift to a great many women, and I do not think she has been thanked enough for it.

If I could ask Perla one question, I would ask her what she remembers most clearly from those early nights in Santos. Not the gold records, not the honours, but the nights in the nightclub, when the room was noisy and she had to win it over with a quiet song. I think her answer would tell us more about her than any list of awards could. Awards are given by institutions. A room going quiet because a voice is beautiful is given by the people in the room, and it cannot be faked. Perla earned that silence many times, and she earned it with a voice that asked for nothing more than to be heard.

I also keep returning to the family group, Las Maravillas del Paraguay, because it is the part of her story that explains everything else. A girl who learns to sing beside her father and her siblings learns that music is not a solo act. It is a shared thing, something you do with people you trust, something that holds a family together. When Perla later stood alone on a stage in Santos, she was not really alone. She was carrying that family sound with her, the sound of voices that had practised together at home, and that gave her a steadiness that a singer trained only in a studio might never find. I think that is why her singing feels so warm. It is not the warmth of a performer trying to charm a room. It is the warmth of a person who learned music as love, inside a family, before she ever learned it as work.

There is one more thing I want to say about her name, Perla Paraguaia. In Brazil, that name told audiences exactly who she was: a Paraguayan singer, proud of it, not hiding it. She could have chosen a name that sounded Brazilian, and nobody would have blamed her for it. She did the opposite. She kept Paraguay in her name, in her repertoire, and in her voice, and she let Brazilian audiences love her as a Paraguayan. That is a quiet kind of pride, and I think it is the reason Paraguay honoured her as it did. She never pretended to be someone else. She crossed a border, she learned a new language, she sang in four languages, and through all of it she remained the girl from Caacupé. That is not a small achievement. It is a life lived with its roots showing, and I admire it enormously.

In the end, I think Perla’s story is a story about a voice that refused to be loud and refused to be forgotten. She sang softly, she sang honestly, and she sang for a very long time. She belonged to Paraguay and to Brazil, she sang in four languages, she sold millions of records, she was honoured by her country, and she faced hardship with the same quiet dignity she brought to her singing. That is a life worth telling, and a voice worth remembering. When I listen to her Fernando now, I do not only hear a hit from 1976. I hear a girl from Caacupé who crossed a border with a song in her heart, and who never stopped singing it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Perla, and what is her real name?

Perla is the stage name of Ermelinda Pedroso Rodríguez D’Almeida, a Paraguayan-born Brazilian singer. She was born on 17 March 1952 in Caacupé, Paraguay, and she is also known as Perla Paraguaia. Her name means pearl in Spanish, and it fits the clear, gentle quality of her voice.

How did Perla become famous in Brazil?

Perla became nationally known in Brazil in 1976 with her Portuguese version of ABBA’s song Fernando, released on the RCA album Palavras de Amor. She had already been working in Brazil for some years, singing in nightclubs in Santos, and the record turned her from a working club singer into a nationally known recording artist.

What kind of songs does Perla sing?

Perla sings romantic music, mainly guaranias and boleros, along with Portuguese-language versions of international pop songs. Through her career she has recorded in Spanish, Portuguese, English and Italian. Her best-known songs include Fernando, Pequenina, her version of ABBA’s Chiquitita, and Comienza amanecer.

What is the song Comienza amanecer about?

Comienza amanecer, which means the dawn begins, is a song from 1981 about a woman living with her husband’s infidelity. It became one of Perla’s greatest successes because many women recognised their own experience in its story. Perla sang it with dignity and restraint, which is part of why the recording has lasted.

How many records has Perla sold?

Brazilian and Paraguayan media have credited Perla with sales of more than ten million records, along with ten gold records, two platinum records and a double platinum record. These figures are widely reported, though they come from media accounts rather than a single audited source, so they should be read as the public record of a very successful career.

Did Perla receive honours in Paraguay?

Yes. In June 2018 the Chamber of Deputies of Paraguay awarded her the Orden Nacional al Mérito Comuneros for her career and international prominence. In November 2025 the same body presented her with the Premio Emiliano R. Fernández for her contribution to Paraguayan culture. Both honours recognised a singer who had spent most of her working life in Brazil.

Is Perla still singing today?

Yes, she has remained active across the decades, and in 2024 she joined Brazilian singer Ana Castela on a recording of Mercedita for Castela’s project Herança Boiadeira, Volume 1. The collaboration brought her voice to a younger audience and showed that she is still performing and recording in her seventies.

Where did Perla grow up, and how did she start singing?

Perla grew up in Caacupé, Paraguay, in a family of musicians, and she first performed with her father and siblings in the family group Las Maravillas del Paraguay. She moved to Brazil in the early 1970s, settled in Santos, and began singing in nightclubs, including one called O Bigode do Meu Tio, before her recording career took off.