The resting place of a landlocked country’s navy, from a forgotten war, the “town” of Vapor Cué has practically everything going for it: history, natural environment, a story too bizarre not to be true, and more than a touch of absurdity and sadness.

Vapor Cué was the end of the line in 1869, and 133 years later nothing much has changed. The asphalt road turns to gravel a couple kilometers before the site. There’s no town at Vapor Cué; it’s just a place where the remains of six boats were salvaged from the nearby river. The two large steamboats, the “Amambay” and the “Pirabebé” look as if they are ready to set sail. The exhibit does not describe the extent to which they have been reconstructed, but it must have been considerable. Only pieces remain of the four smaller steamboats; “Paraná,” “Río Apa,” “Ypora” and “Salto de Guairá.”

The four smaller boats’ wooden parts either burned or decayed in the river, so what remains is mostly cast iron. Massive furnaces and pressure tanks—labeled by boat—are mounted on concrete blocks and some of the power train and side wheels have also survived. None of the mechanisms are entirely preserved, but looking at all of them you can see how steam—the cutting edge of technology in the mid-19th century—powered these revolutionary vessels.

The remains of its wooden keel rests behind the salvaged “Salto de Guairá” and there is enough left of it to give a picture of what it must have been like: a wooden boat with a cast iron furnace powering two side wheels. Picture a large version of The African Queen without Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. “Salto de Guairá” was built in Paraguay with British technical assistance and christened by Doña Rafaela López—sister of the President who precipitated the War of the Triple Alliance—on July 17, 1857, in the presence of her father, President Don Carlos Antonio López. (Doña Rafaela, along with her mother and sisters, snubbed Madame Lynch, their brother Francisco’s mistress. When Francisco succeeded his father as President, Madame Lynch got her revenge by placing Doña Rafaela in a caged wagon.)

The larger boats were steam-powered but also had masts for sails and rigging. “Pirabebé” (“Flying Fish” in Guaraní) was propeller-driven. “Amhambay,” a double side-wheeler, was captured from the Brazilians in one of the war’s first actions. Marines from the “Ypora” and “Río Apa”—the remains of which now sit a few meters away from “Amhambay”—boarded and captured it. Four days later, on January 10, 1865, a gunpowder explosion killed 25 Paraguayan officers and men and sidelined the “Amhambay” for much of the war.

Vapor Cué is a Paraguayan national park developed with Spanish assistance. It is the fruit of the goodwill that existed between former Presidents Franco and Stroessner. The park is simple but nicely laid out. It has a monument to the sailors of the Paraguayan Navy and the remains of each boat are clearly labeled and displayed around a large dirt cul-de-sac.

Hardly anybody visits Vapor Cué. As a naval archaeological find, these boats are like fossils of the missing link, caught as they are right in the middle of the rapid transition from sail to steam. Clipper ships preceded these boats by a generation; dreadnoughts and ocean liners appeared just a generation later.

The War of the Triple Alliance destroyed Paraguay’s national wealth and productive capacity for a generation and may have killed up to 20 percent of Paraguay’s male population (demographic research has shown that it did not kill 80% of Paraguay’s males, as is sometimes asserted). Their involvement in the war helped to consolidate the Brazilian and Argentine states and, ominously, made strong national institutions of their armed forces. And like the American Civil War, the War of the Triple Alliance held some important lessons about the future of warfare.