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.