When I first looked at backpacking in South America, back in around 2012, I noticed entries in the guidebook about the Jesuit ruins in Paraguay. I always though they’d be interesting to see, partly because although the UK has lots of ruins, and ruins are the same everywhere more-or-less, we don’t have this type of ruin. But partly also because they’re a UNESCO World Heritage Site that no-one really ever visits, so I’d be able to visit somewhere historically significant and yet still well Beyond The Brochure, as it were. Looking into them in more detail though, it seemed that they’d be tricky to get to, especially without a knowledge of Spanish, since they didn’t appear too simple to get to by public transport.
What are the Jesuit Ruins?
Around 1600, and relatively not long after the Spanish Empire began colonising this part of what was later to become South America, Jesuit missionaries began to emigrate here in fairly decent numbers. It seems they were originally invited by one of the local archbishops (in Asunción, what is now the capital of Paraguay), with the approval of the King of Spain, in order to help Christianise the native Guarani people. Western history also suggests the King wanted to improve the lot of the Guarani who were at the time being treated somewhat badly by the colonisers; since the colonisers were also Spanish and ultimately under the behest of the King of Spain, your mileage may vary on that one.
Overview of the ruins at the Trinidad site.
Indeed, when the Jesuits came, they built not just churches, but whole communities, complete with schools, workshops and houses, creating what you might call these days a ‘Company Town’. This was done to educate and reform the Guarani, who’d previously been a somewhat semi-nomadic people, and, the Spanish would argue, ‘civilise’ them. Which involved giving them nicer places to live, teaching them literacy (in Spanish, of course, not their own language), culture (European), and of course all about Jesus Christ. These towns were also designed to be self-sufficient, thus replacing their agricultural system. Improving and advancing the lives of a less-developed people, or colonially imposing a foreign mindset and destroying traditional culture? That’s not a question for this blog to answer.
Anyway, several of these towns were built in the 17th and 18th Centuries, on either side of the Parana River that would later become the border between Paraguay and Argentina. They tended to be planned out in a similar manner, with the church being the most dominating structure, other work and educational buildings close by, and the Guarani houses built a little way off, separated of course from the rest of the town by a large plaza and other open space. The estimated population of these towns was a couple of thousand people, so not huge but certainly bigger than most of the villages that had existed here up to this point.
The remains of the Guarani houses at the Tavarangue site.
The towns lasted until the Jesuits were expelled from South America in 1768, at which point without their dominant landlords, they were quickly abandoned and left to ruin, with any remaining riches reappropriated. Quite why the Jesuits were expelled is again beyond the scope of this blog, but the short version is that other Catholic kingdoms (particularly Portugal and France) were jealous and afraid of their apparent power and influence so launched a disinformation campaign to get the Pope to do something about it. If that sounds familiar, well yes it is.
They were inscribed onto the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1984 (Argentina) and 1993 (Paraguay); the Paraguayan ones are the only UNESCO sites in that country. Many of them have firework displays and/or sound-and-light displays after sunset in the summer months, if it’s not raining, but I didn’t get to see one.
Where are the Jesuit Ruins?
There are many Jesuit Ruins across the region, in NE Argentina (Misiones Province), SE Paraguay (Itapúa Department), and SW Brazil (the state of Paraná). I visited three of the ruined sites; San Ignacio Mini in Argentina, and Santísima Trinidad del Paraná (The Holy Trinity of Paraná) and Jesus de Tavarangue in Paraguay. They’re seen as amongst the best surviving examples.
How do you get to the Jesuit Ruins?
San Ignacio Mini is in the small town of San Ignacio, about an hour from Posadas by bus. These buses are pretty frequent; anything that runs along the main highway between Posadas and Puerto Iguazu will pass the town. The bus station is located off the northbound carriageway on the NE edge of the town, and only about a 10 minute walk from the ruins themselves. Note that the walk is not signposted – you need to cross the main road, head northbound for a couple of blocks (there’s a side road running alongside, with a large green verge between the two) and then, a little way beyond the crest of the hill, take a left, and it’s a couple of blocks up, on the left.
The bus station is a couple of offices of the variety of bus companies that operate routes here, including one that has a local minibus service to surrounding villages. You don’t need to utilise any of the offices, though they do have timetables posted on their windows. You can buy tickets at them, but you can also just get tickets on the buses themselves, which is more useful if you just want the next bus in a particular direction. Note that southbound buses (towards Posadas) tend to stop opposite the station at a bus stop on the road, and not go into the station itself.
The main admin building and museum at the San Ignacio site.
The cost of entry to the ruins, for foreigners, is a relatively steep (at least compared with Paraguay) 13,000 Pesos, or £10. In fairness it is valid for 15 days and also includes entry to a couple of other (relatively nearby) ruins at Santa Ana and Loreta (more-or-less accessible via the same bus, just involves a bit of a walk), and Santa Maria La Mayor, which is some way south, near the Brazilian border, and would require private transport.
In Paraguay, the ruins at Santísima Trinidad del Paraná are in the small town of Trinidad, about an hour NE of Encarnacion. Regular, if not terribly frequent, buses between Encarnacion and Ciudad del Este pass alongside the edge of town (pay at the bus station, about 20,000 Guarani, I don’t recall exactly), and stop outside the town gate. To get to the ruins from here, go through the gate, take the road on the left, and turn right after passing the Posada Maria guesthouse (five blocks). The ticket office is on the left, on the edge of a tree-strewn plaza and not absolutely clearly marked, but there’s at least one security guard sat on a chair who can point you in the right direction.
The Trinidad site, as viewed from outside the fence.
Conversely, the ruins at Jesus de Tavarangue are a little trickier to get to; from the town gate at Trinidad, carry on down the main road until the next main junction, turn left, and continue for about 10km into the town of Jesus de Tavarangue. The ruins are at the far western end of the town. Honestly, it’s probably easier to hire a taxi from Trinidad. I got my hotel to order one; he took me from the hotel to the ruins, waited an hour for me there, then took me to my next hotel in the neighbouring town of Hohenhau (another few km to the north-east of Trinidad), and that whole trip cost a total of 120,000 Guarani, or about £12. My guidebook says there’s an infrequent bus that does the trip, but I didn’t want to take that chance.
Like in Argentina, there’s a single ticket to the ruins that includes access both to Trinidad and Tavarangue, and in addition the ruins at San Cosme y Damián, but the latter is about an hour out of Encarnacion in the opposite direction and not really near anything else of note, so again, probably only for the purists driving cars. That ticket costs 40,000 Guarani.
The ruins of the school at the Tavarangue site.
The reason I only went to the three ruins I did is they’re (relatively speaking) the easiest to get to without a car. The others require a bit more effort, time, and money. There are companies that can take you on tours that visit all of them on a day trip, but obviously that will cost more and are probably only useful if you have a real solid interest in Jesuits or South American history.
They look very close on a map – in fact in a straight line it’s only a shade over 20km between Trinidad and San Ignacio. However to get from one to the other involves going through the twin cities of Posadas and Encarnacion, and this whole journey takes several hours by bus. There is a local service between the two bus stations (neither of which are very central in their respective towns) which only costs a couple of pound, but note in Encarnacion it doesn’t stop *in* the bus station, but rather at a stop outside it, before heading into the northern suburbs, making it quite easy to miss. You could go via Puerto Iguazu and Ciudad del Este, but that seems a bit excessive, even if you are headed to Iguazu Falls anyway.
San Ignacio Mini
Fun fact I learned while writing this blog post – it’s called ‘mini’ to differentiate it from the similarly-named, but larger, ‘misiones’ in the far SW of Paraguay. Anyway. Of the three I went to, this one felt like the largest in area. It’s accessed via a walk that meanders behind one of the colonial buildings that still stands today; this now holds a small museum (included in the entry fee) that covers the site and its archaeology. Almost entirely in Spanish, be noted.
The entrance view at San Ignacio.
The path to the site goes though a small woodland, with ruined buildings and stone blocks visible on either side. These appear to be what remain of the Guarani houses. This opens out into a huge plaza, an open space, roughly square, now covered with grass, that around which the majority of the buildings would have stood. Indeed, what you get a very strong sense of, not just here but in all of the ruins, is space. As becomes apparent with the other ruins, everything is set out in a kind of a block pattern, and there’s huge open areas between the buildings meaning you have the impression that when this was occupied, there’d’ve been a lot of room to walk around in; you wouldn’t have felt ‘enclosed’ by buildings in the same way you would in a modern Western city centre.
The remains of the church archway at San Ignacio.
That’s not to say the buildings wouldn’t have been impressive; indeed one particular building was designed to be the main focal point of the town. This is, of course, the church. There’s a large centre aisle – around 75m long – and very wide (about 25m), with corridors and other rooms off the side. The front of the church is still indicated by the remains of two large brick walls that clearly formed an arched doorway. They’re several humans high, have columns, and still present quite a bit of decoration on the portico. Beyond the doorway the building was clearly very long and still has sections of the original mosaic floor. At the far end the altar can still be discerned with stone steps leading up to it. On my visit, and presumably in perpetuity, the walls of the church were being held up with scaffolding. A sign near the entrance points out the town council and other important people would have been sat in front of the altar, the other mission members off to the side, and the musicians and choir pretty much dead centre.
Inside San Ignacio church.
Many of the buildings, especially the frontage of the church, are made from a red sandstone which makes them easy to carve into quite impressive patterns. Much of the archway has been lost but you can still see a fan-like pattern at the top of the entrance, and Greek-style columns built into the walls., complete with floral décor at their tops. There’s also a large Jesuit logo still visible at waist-height on the rightmost arch.
The remains of other buildings around the rest of the square are also visible. Some of these were governmental, while some were workshops. There was also a college, with what amounted to an on-site hall of residence, next to the church. Surrounding the whole site are trees, which give it a sort of ‘park’ vibe. The area directly behind the church was designated as a ‘vegetable garden’, as the town was intended to be as self-sufficient as possible.
Ruined buildings at the San Ignacio site.
The town also contains a cemetery, apparently divided into four sections by two tree-lined streets. These sections were for men, women, children, and infants. Because in death, as in life, everyone is deemed to need to be separated by dubious metrics.
La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná
It’s actually possible to see much of the front of the outlying ruins from a path that runs alongside the site, though the road that runs along the back of them is down a slight slope so nothing’s visible from that side.
Again the site is pretty large – UNESCO say it covers 8 hectares which makes it about the same size as Buckingham Palace and very slightly smaller than Alcatraz. Like the others it’s very square, in the sense that not only are most of the buildings rectangular, but if you look at it from above it looks like they could all fit onto the squares on a chessboard quite easily. Possibly related, it was one of the last of the Jesuit Misiones to be built – it dates from the early 1700s rather than from the previous century, so could be seen as one of the most developed.
Overview of the ruins at Trinidad.
Again the entryway runs alongside the ruins of native houses, before opening out into a large plaza. At the far end of the plaza is the main church. This has the most impressive ruins, although here it’s not the doorway that remains. Rather it’s the area around and behind the altar – several huge brick walls are still in situ, with rounded tops and a couple of imposing archways in the passages to the side of the central aisle. The altar itself is carved from one large piece of stone, and you can make out the remains of what appear to be human figures on it. Near the altar are steps leading down into a small crypt. There’s not a lot in the crypt, but it exists, and it’s nice and cool. The church also contains a gargoyle on the ground by the entrance, a large baptismal font, and off to one side there is the remains of a huge pulpit, carved with flourishes.
Remains of the church at Trinidad.
The bulk of the ruins of the surrounding buildings – workshops, houses, a school – are made up of the external walls, many of which are connected together with archways, and some internal walls giving a decent impression of the basic framework of the buildings. Obviously none of the have intact roofing. In terms of layout and location, they’re all rectangular, long and thing, and built along straight lines, perpendicular to each other, around large plazas, now covered in grass. And birds that don’t like you getting too close. This was also true at nearby Jesus de Tavarangue. Part of what were the workshops have been given over to other stone remains and detritus found in excavation and archaeology which have yet to be processed or worked out what they were from.
Some of the outlying buildings at the Trinidad site.
One interesting building located off-centre, not present at the other sites I visited, is a square brick tower, quite a decent size, and raised on a terrace of about six levels of stone steps. The maps on site suggest this is a bell-tower, but you’re not permitted to enter it. Next to it is a smaller church, that looks like it would have had an arched walkway alongside, facing the tower.
The tower at Trinidad, next to the ruins of the smaller church it served.
Inside the ticket office is a very small museum (exhibits labelled in Spanish), and a room where you can watch a 10 minute video (available in Spanish, English, and I think German) about the Jesuits, the Misiones in Paraguay, and a bit about the archaeology and recovery of the sites.
Jesus de Tavarangue
The main church here is a very similar size to that in San Ignacio, being the same width (just under 25m) and at 70m only a couple of metres shorter. It’s quite well framed, with very tall external walls remaining, and a frontage where you can still make out the décor on the three portals. According to the literature, the design of this church was consciously copied from the Sanctuary of Loyola, the shrine in Loyola, Spain, that commemorates the birthplace of Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit movement. There is also a slight Moorish influence to some of the décor (again, reflecting the diversity of Spanish architectural styles), which makes this particular church unique amongst the Jesuit sites in South America.
Overview of the ruins at Tavarangue.
One of the interesting features are the two pulpits either side of the aisle about halfway along – most churches obviously only have one. This was apparently to foster debate and to also reinforce the Word, as they felt having two people talking about a topic would make the audience more engaged and remember more of what was said. A bit like a podcast having two hosts rather than one.
Inside the church at Tavarangue. Note the pulpits in the distance.
There’s not as much else to this site, or at least not as much that remains in terms of other buildings. Next to the church are, in succession, the priest’s house, the school, the kitchen, a gate to the gardens, and then the workshops. On the opposite side of the plaza are the basic earthworks to the Guarani houses, set quite a way away from the church and associated admin buildings. A couple of km away is a quarry, from where they would have sourced the stones for the buildings.
Remains of the kitchen area at Tavarangue.
What’s nice about this site is the ticket price includes an audio guide in several languages, including English, which is useful when all the signs are in Spanish. It also has a place where you can watch a video about the Jesuit ruins, but by all accounts it’s the same video as the one you can see in Trinidad.
Where can you stay near the Jesuit Ruins?
I can only talk about accommodation in Paraguay – to visit the San Ignacio ruins in Argentina I took an overnight coach from Buenos Aires that went directly there, and then I caught a series of buses from there, across the border, to Trinidad where I spent the night.
My bedroom at Pension Maria, Trinidad.
Trinidad isn’t a very large town, but there’s a handful of places to stay in and around it. I was at the Pension Maria for one night, a very short walk from the entrance to the ruins at La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná. It’s like a small guesthouse with several floors, and the rooms are pretty large and comfortable, with ensuite bathrooms. There’s a small restaurant (big enough for four or five tables) in the reception area which offers an evening food menu and a small breakfast buffet.
I also stayed two nights at the Parque Manantial in nearby Hohenau, the next town up the road to Ciudad Del Este and about 10km away, so still convenient. This was more like a small resort. It’s a little way off the main road, hidden in the trees; it has a large restaurant and shop, a pool, and plenty of open space. The room I was in was a family room with four single beds, and was right next to the pool; the impression I got was that all the rooms were a similar standard price. Breakfast is a large buffet style; evening meals aren’t terribly exciting, being standard gastropub fayre (I had a Paraguayan steak sandwich).
The public area at Parque Manantial.
The best languages to use around here are Spanish and German, rather than English; this whole part of Paraguay is noted for having a strong Germanic influence. And be aware in both towns the roads feel quite like country lanes, and many do not have neither pavements nor street-lights