I had few demands of Paraguay, but one of them was that I see elegant old buildings, their once-colourful facades now peeling, fading, flaking and crumbling. Asunción didn’t disappoint; its historical heart is full of buildings clinging to their faded grandeur, even as their windows are boarded up and they are abandoned to urban decay.

Downtown Asunción is a strange place, the streets are full of civil servants, money changers and shoe shiners. Everyone else, it seems, has moved out to the suburbs. One of the central plazas has become a tent city; people came from out of town to protest and got stuck here, huddled beneath tarpaulins and around smouldering fires. The presidential palace, the senate and the congress (which is a gleaming new thing built with ‘thanks for believing in us’ money from Taiwan) buildings look out across a sluggish curve of the River Paraguay, but between them and the river has sprouted a shanty-town that now shares a back fence with the palace.

Needless to say the palace is well-maintained (and heavily heavily guarded), as are a few other monuments of national pride, like the Pantheon of Heroes where unknown soldiers and dictators lie coffined side by side. Around these proud edifices the downtown is crumbling. Some of the more significant historical buildings are being restored by various cultural centres – Spain, Catalonia, France, Germany and Japan are all involved in preserving Asunción – but these are well outnumbered by the buildings doomed to obscurity. It is a strange feeling, walking the evening streets and realising just how many of the buildings are uninhabited or underinhabited. It was just as strange realising I was the only guest for four nights in a three-story hotel.

Where once the city might have clustered around its palace and cathedral, now it centres itself around the malls. Giant shopping compounds, skirted by drive-through everything (including the first McDonalds I’d seen in seven months) are scattered around outer-Asunción, and these are a far far better place for sampling the contemporary culture of the city. The centre of the city might be decaying, but out around the malls everything is fresh and hip and glossy.

I inevitably cringed, as most backpackers will cringe, at the idea of spending too much time among the malls. The old downtown was full of fantastic, free galleries and museums and cultural centres. The malls were full of people. The old downtown was full of crumble and decay that for whatever reason attracts me so, but the malls had places to eat, supermarkets, bookstores. For any Paraguayo the choice must be easy; grub around among the emptying shells of the past, or hang out with your friends and meet people among the foodcourts and cinemas of new-Asunción. It is a shame for the city, and after visiting the malls the centre feels all the more forlorn and lonely, but this was exactly what I demanded to see. So the malls  and the McDonalds, the SUVs and the siliconed wives, the enormous parking lots and air-conditioned foodcourts, maybe they’re all just the inevitable consequence of my search for elegantly crumbling architecture.