Caacupé is where Paraguay goes on foot. The Virgin of the Miracles of Caacupé is the country's patron, and on 8 December, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, pilgrims walk the 54 km from Asunción along Ruta 2 — through the night, in family groups, on a road closed to give them room. The crowd in the basilica square runs into the hundreds of thousands. Nothing else in Paraguay is on that scale.
The basilica itself is a big modernist thing finished in the 1980s, blue-domed, with a viewing gallery in the tower that looks over the Cordillera de los Altos. It is not a beautiful building and that is beside the point; the object of devotion is a small carved wooden Virgin, made — the story goes — by a Guaraní convert named José who hid from a war party behind a tree trunk and carved her from that same wood in thanks. The older colonial church on the site was finished in 1770.
Outside the pilgrimage the town is quiet and genuinely pleasant, 180 m up where the air is a little cooler than Asunción's, with a long line of stalls selling religious kitsch, leather pyrography and rosaries. It is the standard lunch stop on the Circuito de Oro.
If you come on 8 December, come knowing what you are walking into: no accommodation, no parking, and an experience that tells you more about the country than any museum in it. If you don't want that, come any other day — the basilica is open, the square is empty, and the whole visit takes forty minutes.