The house of the Hacienda El Paraíso was built around 1816. In 1846 it was bought by Jorge Isaacs' father, who lived there much of his childhood. The time in which the novel takes place (between 1844 and 1849) coincides with the childhood of the novelist. The house was remodeled in the middle of the last century by the artist Luis Alberto Acuña who, according to Luis Enrique Osorio, "rebuilt the manor house based on the customs of the ancestor century and the passages of the novel."