The name Luque is first mentioned in 1635, in an act of the Cabildo of Asunción when the colonial governor of the Governorate of Paraguay, Martín Ledesma de Valderrama, granted two leagues of land to a Spanish Captain named Miguel Antón de Luque in a place near Asunción known as las Salinas. According to the act this was the place where Captain Antón de Luque had been working an Encomienda for more than twenty years.
A century later, in 1743, another Miguel de Luque, a descendant of the first mentioned, made a donation by testament of a section of those lands to the Franciscans who built a chapel for the devotion of the Virgin of the Rosary in 1750 - 1755, and from that time the old name of Salinas was changed to Valle de Luque.
In 1781, governor Pedro Melo de Portugal made the first administrative division of the Governorate of Paraguay into six towns and designated the district with the name Partido de Luque.