The town that rebelled against the crypto farm that kept it awake for six months

https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-08-31/the-town-that-rebelled-against-the-crypto-farm-that-kept-it-awake-for-six-months.html

The town that rebelled against the crypto farm that kept it awake for six months

Paraguay has become a paradise for cheap energy, and communities like Santa Lucía de Villarrica are suffering from its dark side

JOSUÉ CONGO
Villarrica (Paraguay) - AUG 31, 2025 - 00:00 EDT

The first time Irene Brizuela heard the buzzing that was to become unending, she thought it was a beehive. To her, it was a noise, but to her five-year-old nonverbal son on the autism spectrum, it was the beginning of a crisis. “He began to cry and shake. We had to close the door to his room so that he wouldn’t hear it,” she says, remembering that late night in June 2024. It was to become their daily routine for the next six months.

Brizuela, a 32-year-old nurse, lives with her son and husband 650 feet away from a bitcoin farm in Santa Lucía de Villarrica, the capital of the department of Guairá, located three hours from Asunción, Paraguay. The farm is property of the Canadian firm Bitfarms, which trades on the U.S. and Canadian stock markets.

Brizuela and her family’s neighbors couldn’t rest either. José Luis Figueredo began to take sleeping pills. For the accountant, who lives a half mile from the farm, it was like listening to a truck lugging a semi-trailer around his home’s interior, 24 hours a day. “There comes a moment in which your mental health is impacted. I thought, ‘I’m going to throw a bomb and bring down the electrical grid.’ It was really affecting me. I was afraid of having to depend on medication to be able to rest,” he says.

That noise that tormented the Santa Lucía neighborhood between June and November of 2024 came from the processors, plus the fans and hot-air extractors that regulate their temperature. The residents lived under these conditions until the city’s public prosecutor’s office filed charges against Bitfarms for harmful noise offenses.

An investigation by El Surti and EL PAÍS found irregularities in the administrative processes of the Municipality of Villarrica and its environmental department that permitted the Canadian company to operate in a residential area where houses were located less than 165 feet away. It also found that the neighbors had been left with symptoms ranging from irritability to post-traumatic stress.

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