Hectare vs Acre
While we were in Paraguay, my Uncle Heriberto took us to see one of his ranches. He said that the ranch that we visited was about 2,000 hectares. That sounded pretty impressive to me, but I didn’t really know exactly how big a hectare was. When I got home, I went to look it up, but I got confused and I tried to look up an octare, which I don’t think really exists. Anyway, today my (US) uncle and I were talking about land - one of our favorite subjects - and the measurement of land parcels came up. We talked about the hectare and I decided to look it up again.
A hectare, according to Wikipedia, is equal to 2.471 acres. For those of you who live in NYC and don’t know how big an acre is (or, for some reason, unlike my family, you don’t end up talking about land every time you get together,) there are 640 acres in one square mile. That means that one single ranch was approximately 5,000 acres, or 7.8 square miles.
His other ranch, which we didn’t visit, is about 8,000 hectare - 4 times that size!
