Asunción city centre guided tour
Prepare yourself for an urban safari where the lions are cars and the lynxes are police officers. We’ll pass through Plaza Uruguaya, where we’ll find a very important gentleman named Bastos; the train station, which no longer has trains but does have stories; the Cathedral, which watches over everything with a solemn face; the Congress building, where things no one understands are discussed; the Cabildo, which seems to claim “I was here first”; the House of Independence, which still smells of patriotic gunpowder; the Pantheon of Heroes, where all its inhabitants sleep during the day; the Government Palace, where no one lives; and the Recova, where bargaining is a national sport.
Mercado 4 guided tour
Welcome to Asunción’s most delicious chaos: Mercado 4. Here you can buy everything from stiff-legged chickens to a phone charger, all in the same aisle. The aromas compete like a contest: from remedios refrescantes aka yuyos remedies to asado available from 7 a.m., which you can taste while risking your life sitting on one of the stools at street level, where the roar of cars echoes like on Fifth Avenue in New York. It’s the perfect place to get lost, find yourself, and get lost again, while your guide makes sure you don’t end up falling in love with the “hola mi rey/reina” of one of the vendors.
Dictatorship tour
Each country has its own dark past and, in Paraguay, that is the Stroessner dictatorship (the longest in Latin America). In this tour I’m going to take you to the Justice Palace were you’ll understand the context before the coup d’êtat, the different periods within the autocracy and you will be able to see with your own eyes the Archive of Terror (UNESCO inmmaterial heritage). We will play you some audiovisual pieces so that you understand how the archive was found and the details of the Cóndor Operation. After that, we will go to the Museo de las Memorias, the place where the tortures of the regime took place. You will understand how the regime was internally organised, you will meet the characters of the history and the elements used.
