Six days in Paraguay: almost nobody comes here, and the ruins alone are worth the trip

Begin at the Panteón Nacional de los Héroes on its downtown corner. It was modelled on the Invalides in Paris, begun in the 1860s, interrupted by the war that nearly destroyed the country, and only finished in the 1930s. Inside are the unknown soldier and the marshals and presidents, with a guard that changes on alternate days.

Two streets away, the Casa de la Independencia is a low white house of 1772 around a courtyard, where in May 1811 a small group met at night and arranged the removal of the Spanish governor. It worked, and unlike most of the risings of those years it was never reversed. The rooms are laid out as they would have been then.

Save the Palacio de López for the end of the day. The presidential palace was built in the 1860s facing the river, the interior is closed to visitors, and it is floodlit after dark, which is when the promenade below it fills up and the building earns its reputation.

The Centro Cultural El Cabildo sits above the river in the building that housed the Paraguayan congress until 2003. It now holds several floors of exhibition space covering indigenous work, colonial carving and contemporary shows, and it is one of the few museums in the city that opens at weekends.

Next door, the Manzana de la Rivera is a whole block of interconnected colonial houses turned into a cultural complex, with a museum of the city, a library, changing exhibitions and a café in the courtyard looking directly across at the palace. It is the most agreeable hour downtown.

In the afternoon, take a taxi east to the Museo del Barro. It is the outstanding museum in Paraguay and would hold its own anywhere: pre-Columbian ceramics, Guaraní featherwork and masks, colonial carved saints, and contemporary Paraguayan painting, all hung together on the argument that they are one tradition rather than three. Two hours, and its opening days are limited, so check before you go.

Areguá is half an hour east of the capital on the shore of Lake Ypacaraí, and it is where Asunción goes at the weekend. It is a hill town of colonial houses known for strawberries in winter and for ceramics year round, with stalls of pots and garden figures lining the road up from the water at a fraction of city prices.

Go first to Cerro Koi on the edge of town, before the heat. The hill is sandstone that has cracked into hexagonal columns, a formation that occurs in only a handful of places on earth, and you can walk up to it and put a hand on it. An hour, protected, and usually empty.

Work back down through the town afterwards. Casa Amarilla is part gallery, part antique shop and part guesthouse in a building that once belonged to the López family estate, and it is a great deal odder and better inside than the frontage suggests. The church at the top of the hill looks out over the lake, which is lovely from up there and too polluted to swim in.

The coach south takes most of the day, five to seven hours through cattle country and the old mission towns, calling at San Ignacio Guazú about three hours down. Take a morning departure, sit on the shaded side, and buy chipa through the window when the sellers get on at a stop.

Encarnación arrives as a surprise: modern, low, clean, laid out along a broad river with Argentina on the other bank. Drop the bags and walk to the Plaza de Armas, a square of trees, flags and a small Japanese garden, planted by the descendants of the Japanese farmers who settled this part of Paraguay in the twentieth century. The cathedral is a couple of blocks away.

Then go down to the water for the end of the afternoon. When the Yacyretá dam raised the Paraná it swallowed the old riverside town, and the city answered by building a long promenade with imported sand along it. The result is a proper beach several hundred kilometres from any sea, busy in the evening, with the lights of Posadas coming on across the water.

For about a hundred and fifty years the Jesuits ran a network of reductions across this region: self-governing Guaraní towns of several thousand people each, with their own workshops, orchestras, printing presses and militias, outside the reach of the slave raiders and largely outside the reach of the crown. In 1767 Charles III expelled the order from the Spanish empire and the whole system stopped within a few years.

Trinidad, thirty kilometres north on the Ciudad del Este road, is the best preserved of them. The great church of red sandstone lost its roof and its walls stand open to the sky, but a carved stone frieze of angels playing organs, maracas and trumpets survives along the inside, and beyond it are the plaza, the rows of Guaraní houses, the bell tower and a smaller earlier church. One to two hours, and there is a small museum by the gate.

Jesús de Tavarangué is ten kilometres further on and is stranger, because it was never finished. The masons were still building when the expulsion order came, so what stands is a huge church stopped mid-construction, with three enormous Moorish trefoil doorways and no roof it ever carried. Bring lunch and eat it in the plaza; there is nothing at the site.

The ticket covers both of these and a third site west of here, and Trinidad is floodlit at night in season, which is worth asking about at the gate.

Mboi Kae is the other river beach, a couple of kilometres along the shore from the centre, quieter than the main one and used mostly by people who live here. An hour in the water and a coffee on the promenade is the right way to spend a last morning in a town this size.

Then decide which way you are going. Posadas, in Argentina, is fifteen minutes across the bridge on a local bus that stops at both immigration posts and waits for you; keep the ticket stub, because if you are slow through the window it will go on without you and the next one will take you for free. Posadas has an airport with flights to Buenos Aires.

Otherwise the coach back to Asunción takes the day, or the short domestic flight takes an hour.