San Lorenzo Mártir Church in Altos Completes Nearly Eight-Year Restoration
A colonial church just outside Asunción has emerged from nearly eight years of phased conservation with its liturgical life intact. The restoration of the San Lorenzo Mártir church in Altos, Paraguay, has now been completed, closing a project that began in 2018 and moved forward while services continued inside the building.
Located about 60 kilometers from the capital, the Franciscan church was designated a National Cultural Heritage Site in 2017, a recognition that underscored its place among Paraguay’s most important religious monuments. The work gradually revealed the building’s original character, while also drawing attention to its long history in a region shaped by early Franciscan activity and the colonial expansion of Asunción into Guaraní territories.
The final phase, completed recently, focused on the church’s wooden doors and windows, according to Ana Butlerov, the new head of the Historical Heritage Unit at Paraguay’s Ministry of Public Works and Communications (MOPC). Earlier stages had already addressed the main and side altarpieces, along with wall niches and the pulpit. Throughout the process, the church remained open to worshippers.
The most closely watched element of the project was the main altarpiece, one of the strongest examples of Paraguayan colonial Baroque. Measuring 5.5 meters high and 3.75 meters wide, it had not undergone a full restoration for more than a century. Conservators dismantled it into more than 300 pieces so they could treat termite damage and moisture, two persistent threats to wooden heritage in the region. As layers of deteriorated varnish, repainting, and later interventions were removed, traces of the altarpiece’s original polychromy began to reappear, along with ornamental details that had long been hidden.
The restoration also brought renewed attention to the craftsmanship associated with local woodcarving workshops and to the Franciscan visual tradition that shaped the church’s interior. During the first phase, conservators worked on the predella and upper section of the altarpiece, where images of Saints Joseph, Lawrence, and Roch appear alongside the Assumption of Mary. A second phase addressed the wall niches and the pulpit, extending the conservation effort to other devotional and historical features.
The church itself was built in the 16th century and rebuilt after the Paraguayan War (1864-70), a conflict that altered much of the country’s built heritage. Its completion now adds momentum to a broader effort in Paraguay to safeguard colonial religious sites that preserve altarpieces, carvings, adobe walls, and woodwork from the earliest decades of evangelization and settlement. In Altos, that history is once again visible in the grain of the wood and the restored surfaces of a church that never stopped being used.
