Best Things to Do in Asunción: Palaces, Museums and River Walks

Asunción rewards travellers who look beyond checklist monuments to appreciate its blend of nineteenth-century state architecture, world-class Indigenous and popular art collections, and unvarnished riverfront life. Most historic landmarks cluster within a twenty-minute walk of Plaza Uruguaya and the Bay of Asunción, while major museums and parks in the eastern districts are a fifteen-minute taxi ride away.

1. Walk the Nineteenth-Century Neoclassical Civic Core

Begin on the riverfront terrace at the Palacio de los López, the pink-and-cream neoclassical seat of the Paraguayan presidency designed by English-born architect Alonso Taylor and Italian architect Alessandro Ravizza between 1857 and 1867. Nearby stand the 1844 El Cabildo, the 1845 Metropolitan Cathedral, and the domed Panteón Nacional de los Héroes on Calle Palma.

2. Step Inside the 1772 Casa de la Independencia

Two blocks northwest of the Panteón stands the Casa de la Independencia, the oldest surviving colonial adobe residence in the capital. Built in 1772 by Antonio Martínez Sáenz with whitewashed mud walls, a bamboo ceiling framework (tacuara), and curved clay roof tiles, this house was where Pedro Juan Caballero, Fulgencio Yegros, Vicente Ignacio Iturbe, and José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia plotted the bloodless revolution of the night of 14 and 15 May 1811. Step out into the original Callejón Histórico alley through which the patriots marched to the colonial barracks.

3. Explore the Museo del Barro and the 1861 Railway Station

No visit to Paraguay is complete without spending two hours at the Centro de Artes Visuales / Museo del Barro in the eastern neighbourhood of Isla de Francia. Its three interconnected museums display rural black-and-red ceramic figures from Itá, Tobatí, and Areguá, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit and Franciscan carved polychrome saints, ceremonial feather diadems and woven caraguatá bags from the seventeen Indigenous peoples of Paraguay, and modern Latin American painting. Back in the centre on Plaza Uruguaya, step inside the vaulted Estación Central del Ferrocarril Carlos Antonio López (inaugurated in October 1861) to see preserved nineteenth-century British steam locomotives and wooden carriages.

4. Taste Tereré at Mercado 4 and Climb Loma San Jerónimo

For a morning immersion into Paraguayan daily commerce, walk the herbal stalls of Paseo de los Yuyos in Mercado Municipal N° 4, where herbalists crush fresh peppermint, lemongrass (cedrón kapi'i), and saffron root in wooden mortars for morning tereré. Afterwards, head west of the old port to Loma San Jerónimo, a hillside barrio of narrow stepped passages, brightly painted houses, and rooftop viewpoints overlooking the Paraguay River, before strolling the 7-kilometre Costanera at sunset.

5. Venture Out on the Circuito de Oro to Lake Ypacaraí and Yaguarón

Within an hour of the capital, the hills of the Central and Paraguarí departments open onto lakeside artisan towns and eighteenth-century Franciscan reductions. Follow our guides to Areguá and Lake Ypacaraí for red-clay pottery, Cerro Koi's octagonal sandstone columns, and the 1898 Castle of Carlota Palmerola, or explore Yaguarón and Itauguá to see the spiderweb lace of ñandutí and the gilded 1755 Franciscan church of San Buenaventura.