🇦🇷 Argentina · The Northeast
Apóstoles is a town in southern Misiones that proudly holds the title of National Yerba Mate Capital. It was here that, in the early 20th century, the arrival of settlers — above all Ukrainian and Polish immigrants — kicked off large-scale cultivation of yerba mate, the plant that defines the culture of the Argentine Northeast and of much of the country. The town still carries that yerba stamp in its economy, its landscape of plantations and its identity.
Its history runs deeper still: Apóstoles was born as one of the Jesuit-Guaraní reductions, part of the famous Thirty Towns of the Missions, before being reborn as a modern farming colony. That double inheritance — missionary and immigrant, with a strong Slavic imprint — gives it a particular character, visible in its churches, its traditions and its food.
It's an ideal destination for a 1- or 2-day getaway from Posadas (just 65 km along National Route 14): you visit the Casa del Mate, tour yerba mate plants with tastings, do the circuit of the 7 community churches and try the Slavic cooking — varenyky, holubtsi — that you won't find in almost any other corner of the country. And if you travel in November, the National and International Yerba Mate Festival turns the town into the great festival capital of the Northeast.
Apóstoles was founded in the 17th century as one of the Jesuit-Guaraní reductions (its full name was Santos Apóstoles San Pedro y San Pablo), part of the Thirty Towns of the Missions. After the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 and the decline of the missions, the place was left almost empty. In the early 20th century it was reborn as a farming colony with the arrival of immigrants, above all Ukrainians and Poles, who drove large-scale yerba mate cultivation, turning Apóstoles into the cradle of modern Argentine yerba growing and, in time, into the National Yerba Mate Capital. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The province of the Paraná rainforest and the red earth: home to the famous Jesuit-Guaraní missions, today a World Heritage Site, to the yerba mate that peopled its forests, and to the Iguazú Falls, one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World.
Read the history of Misiones →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
On 27 August 1897, twelve families — six Polish and six Ukrainian — climbed down from rough carts in a forest clearing in southern Misiones. They had no idea that they were founding, without meaning to, what two decades later would be called the National Yerba Mate Capital. That handful of settlers freshly arrived from Galicia set up camp, without fully realizing it, on the all but erased ruins of a town that had already existed there a hundred and thirty years earlier: a Jesuit reduction.
The origin of Apóstoles does indeed go back to the era of the Guaraní Jesuit missions. In the 17th century, the Society of Jesus founded a reduction in the region under the full name of Santos Apóstoles San Pedro y San Pablo, part of the famous group known as the 'Thirty Towns of the Missions', spread across what are today Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil.
Like the other reductions, Apóstoles was a planned town where the Jesuits gathered and evangelized the Guaraní, organizing a community with its church, its square, its workshops and its economy. Yerba mate, incidentally, already played a prominent role in those missions: the Jesuits learned to grow and process it from seedlings that the farmers themselves rescued from the forest near the old ruins of San Ignacio, and 'Jesuit yerba' was one of the reductions' signature products — a distant forerunner of the yerba calling the area would rediscover centuries later.
The expulsion of the Society of Jesus from the Spanish dominions, ordered by Charles III in 1767, marked the beginning of the end for the missions. Without the Jesuits, the towns went into decline, and through the wars and conflicts of the 19th century most were ruined or emptied. Apóstoles, as a reduction, all but disappeared, and the region stayed almost empty for a long time, until those twelve families of 1897 put a town back on that same spot.
Apóstoles was reborn in the late 19th century, when the Argentine state pushed the agricultural settlement of the territory of Misiones to populate it and put it into production. Within that framework, on 27 August 1897, the first contingent arrived: twelve settler families — six Polish and six Ukrainian — from the region of Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was the starting point of the entire settlement of Misiones on the back of Slavic immigration, and that founding nucleus was followed, in the years that came after, by many more contingents of Ukrainians and Poles, plus other nationalities.
These settlers established themselves around the old reduction and set about clearing the forest, farming the fertile red soil and founding the agricultural colonies that would give life to the new Apóstoles. They brought with them their religion — the Ukrainian Greek Catholic and Orthodox rites, alongside Polish Roman Catholicism — their traditions, their music, their dances and their food, leaving a Slavic imprint that survives to this day in the identity of the town and the region.
The Slavic settlement of Apóstoles is considered a milestone of European immigration in northern Argentina, and the town is recognized as one of the country's main centers of Ukrainian and Polish descendants. Its churches with their distinctive domes, its festivals and its typical dishes are living testimony to those pioneers who turned the forest into thriving colonies.
Apóstoles' great contribution to Argentine economic history was becoming the cradle of modern yerba growing. Although yerba mate had already been cultivated by the Jesuits, through the 19th century its production rested above all on harvesting wild yerba stands. It was in the early 20th century, with the settlement of Misiones, that systematic large-scale cultivation of yerba mate in plantations developed, and Apóstoles was one of the pioneering places in that process.
The settlers, above all those of Slavic origin, found in yerba an ideal crop for the red soil of Misiones, and the plantations multiplied, giving rise to an industry that would become one of the country's most distinctive. Misiones (together with northeastern Corrientes) became the great producing region for yerba mate, the plant behind the ritual of mate, Argentina's national infusion par excellence.
In recognition of that historical role, Apóstoles was named National Yerba Mate Capital, a title it celebrates every year with the National Yerba Mate Festival. Today the town still lives around the 'green gold': its plantations, its processing plants and its yerba culture are a central part of its identity, one that weaves together the Jesuit inheritance, the Slavic imprint and the Argentine passion for mate.
Modern Apóstoles takes as its founding date the arrival of that first contingent of settlers in 1897 — most of them Ukrainians and Poles from the region of Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — sent by the Argentine government to populate the National Territory of Misiones. That pioneering immigration, one of the first organized Ukrainian waves to reach the country, gave birth to the town as it is known today and set its Slavic character.
Through the 20th century, Apóstoles grew at the pace of the yerba economy and of the institutional consolidation of Misiones, which stopped being a National Territory and became a province in 1953. The town gradually acquired schools, churches for the different communities, yerba cooperatives and services, establishing itself as the seat of the department of the same name and as one of the hubs of the south of the province. The cooperative structure was key: the yerba-growing settlers organized themselves to process and sell their output without depending solely on the big Buenos Aires middlemen, an associative model that shaped much of the rural economy of Misiones through the 20th century.
In recent decades, Apóstoles has strengthened its identity around three pillars: its Jesuit past, its Slavic immigrant heritage and its status as capital of yerba mate. The National and International Yerba Mate Festival — reaching its 48th edition in 2026, held from 4 to 8 November — along with the community celebrations, the churches circuit and the Casa del Mate have turned the town into a cultural tourism destination that invites you to walk through several centuries of Argentine history in a few blocks: from the 17th-century Jesuit utopia to the carts of Slavic settlers in 1897, by way of the industry that today exports yerba mate to much of the continent.