The cemetery occupies the site of a Recollect convent, a Franciscan order whose property was nationalized by José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the austere dictator who had appointed himself head of the Paraguayan church. Under President Carlos Antonio López and consul Mariano Roque Alonso, the land was formally established as a burial ground on October 20, 1842. It was the first general public cemetery in both the city and the nation, a quietly radical idea: a place where the dead belonged to the state and the people, not to a parish. The avenue running past it carries the name of Mariscal López, the marshal whose family now lies across the city in the National Pantheon.

The most visited tomb belongs to Eliza Lynch, an Irishwoman who became the companion of Francisco Solano López and, in all but title, the first lady of Paraguay. She bore him six children and rode with the army through the catastrophic War of the Triple Alliance, then died in obscurity and poverty in Paris in 1886. There the story might have ended. But in 1961, the dictator Alfredo Stroessner had her remains exhumed from Paris, brought back to Asunción, and reburied here, proclaiming the once-scorned foreigner a national heroine. Her mausoleum is now a pilgrimage point, the resting place of a woman the country could never quite decide how to remember.

The headstones read like a syllabus of Paraguayan culture. Augusto Roa Bastos, the nation's greatest writer, lies here; his novel I, the Supreme conjured the ghost of Dr. Francia, and in 1989 he won the Cervantes Prize, the highest honor in the Spanish language. Nearby rests Silvio Pettirossi, the aviation pioneer who gave his name to the country's main airport before dying in a crash in 1916. Serafina Dávalos, Paraguay's first female lawyer and an early feminist, is buried among them, as is Josefina Plá, a poet and playwright who shaped a century of letters. The most recent arrival carries a modern grief: Marcelo Pecci, an anti-mafia prosecutor gunned down on a Colombian beach in 2022 while on his honeymoon.

More than a dozen presidents of Paraguay lie within these walls, a who's who of a turbulent young republic: Patricio Escobar, Cecilio Báez, Eduardo Schaerer, Higinio Morínigo, Federico Chávez, and many more, their numbered places in the line of succession etched into the marble. Among them too are the ethnologist León Cadogan, who devoted his life to recording the language and beliefs of the Guaraní, and the educator sisters Adela and Celsa Speratti, who helped build modern schooling in Paraguay. Walking the narrow lanes between family vaults, you read the country's whole turbulent history in dates and surnames. Wars, coups, reinventions, and revivals are all here, compressed into a few shaded hectares. The cemetery remains open to the public, a city of the dead that doubles as the clearest map Paraguay has of its own past.