Cultural Centre of the Republic El Cabildo
Paraguay's former Congress building on Plaza de la Independencia, now a free museum of art and history.
The building stands on the site of Asunción's colonial cabildo, on a flank of the main square laid out according to the Laws of the Indies. The present structure went up around 1844 and was given its long arcaded front during the government of Carlos Antonio López, work directed by the Spanish architect Pascual Urdapilleta and inaugurated in March 1857. At different times it housed the executive, the courts and the legislature, and it served as the seat of the National Congress until a new parliament building opened nearby.
The Cultural Centre of the Republic was inaugurated in the old chamber on 14 May 2004 and is administered by Congress. Admission is free. Rooms are devoted to the history of the building, to sacred art, to popular and indigenous art including a ceramics gallery, to the ethnographic photographs of Guido Boggiani, and to Paraguayan music, alongside a hall named for the writer Augusto Roa Bastos, temporary exhibition spaces, a cinema and a library. The centre also runs houses for music, theatre, literature, visual arts and dance.
Highlights
- Arcaded 1850s front by Pascual Urdapilleta on the main square
- Former chamber of the Paraguayan Congress, vacated in 2003
- Rooms of sacred art, popular art and indigenous ceramics
- Guido Boggiani's ethnographic photographs of the Chaco
