South American Jesuit missions

I had a weekend in Paraguay when I didn't need to work, and having read that the ruins of the Jesuit mission in Trinidad, in southern Paraguay, was the least visited UNESCO World Heritage Site in the world, I just had to go there.

It was a seven hour bus ride to Encarnación, and another hour from there on to Trinidad, but I left the capital early so still had plenty of time to look round when I finally arrived in Trinidad, even though the bus driver told me to get off at the wrong stop, adding a one-hour walk to my travel time.

The ruins were nice - not many visitors but I still can't believe fewer people come here than to UNESCO sites in, say, Iran or Burkina Faso.  One of the aspects of these ruins that stand out is the stone carvings - see here the angels around the inside of what must have been the nave.

The Jesuits became pretty powerful in South America.  They didn't work the locals to death but gave them a choice of either paying tribute and continuing their old way of life, or coming 'under the wing' of the Jesuit missionaries.  This involved the adoption of a pretty austere lifestyle, with early morning starts, hard work in the fields, adoption of Christianity and lots of prayers.  They were also allowed to raise and train militias, to defend the settlements against raids.  Their economic success and the success of their militias, however, started to be seen as a threat by the secular authorities, and in 1767, the Spanish King Carlos III expelled the Jesuits from the Spanish South American colonies.

Most, including the one in Trinidad, fell into ruins, but a number in the Chiquitanía province of what is now Bolivia were largely maintained by the indigenous Indians who continued to live in the settlements.  So two weeks after my visit to Trinidad, I went to take a look at three of the missions in Bolivia.

First I went to San Jose de Iquitos, the closest in style to Trinidad as this was built of stone.  It was impressive, and had some rather fine paintings on the walls along the interior corridors. Apparently these were saved from ruin because the local population stayed on, which is pretty surprising given that these had largely been nomadic people before the Jesuits arrived just twenty years earlier.

Then a week later I visited the missions at Concepción and San Javier, also preserved and still used, even though rather more fragile as built not of stone but of wood and adobe.  This is the interior of the mission at Concepción, showing the carved wooden pillars and the ornately painted walls.  Little obvious similarity to those I'd visited before, apart perhaps from the open interior design of the church.

I couldn't get to see inside San Javier, unfortunately, as it was still carnival weekend and the lady with the key was off partying.  But even on the outside I could see once again the spiral carved wooden pillars and ornate painted walls.  Although not religious, I still enjoyed visiting these buildings and wished I'd had time to go to the other half dozen in Bolivia.

carnival in Oruro

The carnival in Oruro, Bolivia, is one of the few events on UNESCO's list of "Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity" that it is feasible to visit.  Made easier for me by the two public holidays in Panama for our own carnival.  So I bought flights to and from Santa Cruz, in southern Bolivia, and booked myself a homestay with a Bolivian family in Oruro for this year's carnival.

However getting there was not to be as simple as I'd hoped, this being Bolivia.  The internal flight from Santa Cruz to Sucre was easy (and cheap, at $47!), despite the near riot from the people queuing at the next check-in desk when they heard their flight to Argentina had been delayed for two days... But getting from Sucre to Oruro required a bus.  & the heavy goods freight drivers had gone on strike, blockading all of the main intercity routes in the country with their vehicles.  Everyone assured me that the government and drivers would reach some kind of accommodation so as to enable the blockades to be lifted in time for carnival, but some of the drivers were holding out, and when I got on my bus at 20:30 the Thursday before carnival, I still wasn't 100% sure I would reach my destination.

Our route was via Potosí, and we were due to arrive in Oruro around 4am.  So when we pulled to a halt during the night and someone said we were in Potosí I was not concerned, and managed to drift in and out of sleep over the next few hours.  In fact for more hours than I expected, as it was 6am when I gave up the idea of more sleep and realised the time, and that we were clearly not in Oruro.  It turned out we were parked in the queue of vehicles waiting to get through the blockade into Potosí, where we had been for most of the night.  Our driver offered to take us back to Sucre, or to sit in the queue all day in the hope that the blockade would be lifted, but somehow the passengers persuaded him to take the bus along a small dirt track (in no way suitable for buses!) around the mountainside, to find an alternative route into Potosí.  We made it, but then coming out the other side on the Oruro road we hit another blockade.

At this point the only option was to get off the bus, take our luggage, and walk the length of the queue, through the blockade, and hope there was some onward transport the other side.  A stream of people were walking towards us having done the same thing in the other direction, and locals were making a Boliviano or two through renting out wheelbarrows to those with plenty of luggage.

Thankfully it was downhill all the way (a 2km walk with luggage at an altitude of 4,000m!), and was not raining, and I made it (without a wheelbarrow!) - finally getting into Oruro at 4pm, only 12 hours late.

& it was all worthwhile.  Add the Oruro carnival to your bucket list!!

Starting around 7am on the Saturday, the main parade lasts around twenty hours, apparently.  I stayed for twelve hours but was too tired following my night in the bus to stay until the end.  But what I saw was amazing.  Oruro carnival is not about wearing skimpy outfits to show off one's physique, but about ancient myths, fables and traditions intermingled with elements of Christianity, and this is reflected is the most incredible and colourful costumes and masks.

The most spectacular masks are those of the devils (diabladas) - in the title photo above but there is also this lighter female version here.  There are also dancers representing rheas (although multicoloured versions!), black slaves, inca chiefs, bulls, bears, condors, and other costumes and dances that recall specific battles (real or mythical) or stages in the country's history.

Specialists work all year to create the costumes and masks, which cost the dancers quite a lot of money, and to be honest the colour and spectacle of it all is quite overwhelming.  There are bands too, mostly brass bands with drummers, but a number of Andean pan pipes were also in evidence.  According to some local figures I read, some 35,000 dancers and 6,000 musicians take part, which is why it takes them twenty hours for all to cover the 3km route.  Apparently most are exhausted by the end, but on the Sunday they get to go into the Church of Virgin of the Grotto (to whom the carnival is dedicated) for a blessing and I was assured that devotion to the Virgin is as big a motivation for those taking part as the party element of the whole thing.

I suppose I would still happily seize the opportunity to see the Rio carnival, but I cannot see that it could possibly be any better than this one.

a final post on Antarctica

I don't feel that my posts on Antarctica and South Georgia were really that coherent, but they are places that assault the senses rather than the intellect, and that for me is quite difficult to capture in writing.  Many of the boat crew are of the opinion that visiting Antarctica changes your view of the world; it didn't do that for me - perhaps I'm just too well-travelled for any one place to have that strong an effect on me now - but it seems that it has left me lost for words.

If I had listened more attentively to the lectures on board and other information shared with us (or rather if I had retained the information, which seemed to go in one ear and out the other), I could write about Shackleton and other Antarctic explorers, or about the whaling and sealing industries, or the Antarctic Treaty, or the eradication of rats on South Georgia.  But all I can really add to my earlier posts is that Antarctica is a stunningly beautiful place - and add a couple more photos as no words I can write will do it justice.