The building was substantially complete by 1867, its halls furnished with bronze statuettes and mirrors imported from Paris, its decoration overseen by European artists who had traveled to Asunción for the project. But the war was already consuming Paraguay. Francisco Solano López fled the capital with his government to Ñeembucú as allied forces closed in. In January 1869, Brazilian and Argentine troops sacked Asunción, damaging the palace's exterior and stripping its ornaments and furniture. For the next seven years, the occupying forces used it as a barracks. By the time Paraguay regained sovereignty in 1876, the palace that was meant to house a dynasty sat derelict, its Parisian mirrors shattered, its ironwork corroded.

President Juan Gualberto González attempted to restore the palace when he took office in 1890, but a coup cut short his efforts. It fell to Juan Bautista Egusquiza to finish the work in 1894, making him the first head of state to actually govern from within its walls. For the next half century, the Palacio de los López served as both workplace and residence for Paraguay's presidents. That changed in November 1942, when President Higinio Morínigo moved the presidential residence to Mburuvicha Róga -- Guaraní for "House of the Chief" -- located about 2.5 kilometers to the southeast. The palace kept its role as the seat of government but lost its residential function, a separation of home and office that has persisted ever since.

The palace witnessed the darkest chapter of modern Paraguayan politics from the inside. Alfredo Stroessner governed from its offices for thirty-four years, running the country under a perpetual state of siege that suspended civil liberties and crushed dissent. When tanks rolled through Asunción on the night of February 2, 1989, the palace stood at the center of the upheaval, its vicinity shelled by artillery and naval vessels during the coup that ended El Stronato. Since then, no president has served more than a single five-year term. The 1992 constitutional reforms prohibited reelection even in non-consecutive terms, a safeguard born from the memory of those decades. Santiago Peña, the current president, was inaugurated on the palace grounds in August 2023.

At night, the Palacio de los López transforms. The building is kept brightly illuminated, its neoclassical facade glowing against the dark sky above Asunción Bay. The effect is deliberate -- the palace is meant to be seen, a symbol of the state made visible. From the air, its position at the edge of the old city center is unmistakable, the white structure fronting the river like a European manor transposed to the subtropics. Everything about it was built from Paraguayan materials -- the quarry stone, the tropical hardwoods, the locally forged iron -- yet designed to evoke the capitals of Europe. It is a building that embodies Paraguay's complicated relationship with its own identity: indigenous Guaraní language on the presidential residence, French mirrors in the presidential office, and a history that includes both brutal dictatorship and the hard-won architecture of democracy.