Asunción was founded in 1537, twenty years before Rio, and its history runs from Guaraní-Spanish mestizaje through a war that killed most of its men to a 35-year dictatorship whose files still sit in a courthouse basement. Three days of walking it.
Consecrated in 1845 on the site of the 1537 founding chapel of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción. The treasury museum holds silver monstrances, colonial santos and a Guaraní-carved pulpit. Tue–Sat 08:00–11:30, 14:00–17:00.
Paraguay's largest church, begun 1893 to replace the temple where the 1820 Easter Conspiracy arrests were staged under Dr. Francia. The Italianate nave was never finished — the money vanished into the Chaco War.
Guaraní feather headdresses, Maká pottery and Chamacoco tools collected before 1930 by physician Andrés Barbero, displayed in his family mansion on Av. España. Labels in Spanish only. Closed Sundays and Mondays.
The cobbled hillside barrio above Bahía de Asunción, the closest surviving urban fabric to the 1537 stockade Juan de Salazar raised on the shore below. Houses have been painted in colour blocks since 2011.
Modelled on Les Invalides, begun 1863 and finished 1936. Inside lie Carlos Antonio López, Mariscal Francisco Solano López, two unknown child soldiers from the 1869 battle of Acosta Ñu and the Chaco War marshals.
South America's first railway left this British-built station in 1861. The wooden ticket hall, telegraph desks and the wood-burning locomotive Sapucai still sit under the original trainshed, largely untouched.
A former Stroessner-era detention house at Chile 1066, run by survivor Martín Almada, who uncovered the Archivos del Terror in 1992. Torture instruments, prisoner cards and Operation Condor correspondence.
The 2003 glass congress stands beside the 1844 Cabildo colonnade — now the Centro Cultural de la República — on ground where Solano López's arsenal once stood, with the bay opening out behind the river wall.
Marble mausoleums of the López and Franco dynasties line the main avenue, alongside the tomb of Elisa Lynch, Solano López's Irish consort, whose remains Stroessner repatriated from Paris in 1961 as a nationalist gesture.
Spread across the Pettirossi blocks since the 1920s, this is where rural Paraguay meets the capital: yuyos herb cutters, ñandutí lace, Korean and Lebanese trader stalls, and Guaraní spoken more than Spanish.
Three collections under one roof: pre-Columbian and Guaraní ceramics, colonial santos carved by mission-trained artisans, and political art made in secret during the 1954–89 dictatorship. Wed–Sat 15:30–20:00.
Carlos Antonio López's 1854 country church, frescoed by Italian painters he imported, with the crypt where Paraguay's first constitutional president was first laid to rest before the Panteón was completed.