🇧🇴 Bolivia · Lowlands, the East and the Amazon
Concepción is one of the loveliest mission towns on the circuit of the Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos, in eastern Santa Cruz. Its church, listed by Unesco as World Heritage along with the other missions, is considered one of the jewels of Chiquitano mission baroque, magnificently restored, with its decorated façade, its carved columns and an interior of great ornamental richness.
The town keeps the atmosphere and the layout of the old Jesuit reductions, with its large square, its houses around the church and the living inheritance of Chiquitano culture, including the tradition of baroque music. Concepción is also an important regional center and an essential stop for anyone following the missions route from Santa Cruz de la Sierra.
This guide covers the essentials of Concepción: its extraordinary mission church, the feel of the town, the musical tradition, how much a visit costs, how to get there and fit it into the missions circuit, where to sleep and eat and practical tips for discovering this treasure of eastern Bolivia.
Concepción was established as a Jesuit mission by fathers Lucas Caballero and Francisco Hervás around 1699-1709, within the Chiquitos reduction system, and settled on its present site in 1722. Its church, one of the most beautiful in mission baroque, was raised between 1752 and 1756 under the direction of Martin Schmid and restored between 1975 and 1982 by the architect Hans Roth; together with five other missions, it was listed by Unesco as World Heritage in 1990. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The great department of the tropical east: Bolivia's economic engine, land of the cambas, home of the celebrated Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos and their baroque music, with the sacred rock of Samaipata, the forests of Amboró and Noel Kempff and the Bolivian Pantanal.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In the heart of the Chiquitano forest, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest Spanish city, stands a mid-18th-century wooden church that still keeps its carved columns, its gilded altars and even its music. That alone is a small miracle: of the Jesuit missions of the Americas, very few survived abandonment, fire and the tropical climate, and almost all the ones you can visit today —like the Guaraní missions of Argentina and Paraguay— are ruins. Concepción is one of those that came through whole, and today it is one of the least known —and most surprising— architectural treasures in South America.
Concepción was founded between the late 17th and the early 18th century by the Society of Jesus as one of the missions of the Chiquitos reduction system, in the east of what is now Bolivia. It thus joined the remarkable group of mission towns the Jesuits established between the late 17th century and the mid-18th to evangelize the Indigenous peoples of the Chiquitano region and organize them into communities, among them the Chiquitano, the Chiquito and other groups of diverse languages and cultures who were gathered around these new settlements.
Like the other reductions, Concepción was laid out around a large square with the church at its center, and it wove religious life together with farm work, craft and art workshops and the practice of music. The mission model aimed at orderly, relatively self-sufficient communities in which the Indigenous population learned and developed artistic and craft skills —woodcarving, painting, singing, playing European instruments— that would leave a lasting mark and that, surprisingly, can still be seen and heard today in the town's workshops and choirs.
The Concepción mission stood out from the start for the beauty of its church, raised in wood and lavishly decorated in the mission baroque style that characterized these reductions. That church, with its carved columns and its rich ornamentation, would in time become one of the great heritage works of eastern Bolivia and the symbol of the town, the obligatory starting point of any guide to what to see in Concepción.
Concepción's founding story is more eventful than its placid name suggests: the mission was first established in 1699 by the Jesuit fathers Francisco Lucas Caballero and Francisco Hervás —the formal founding of La Inmaculada Concepción de María is usually dated 8 December 1709—, but it had to move more than once —in 1707, 1708 and finally in 1722— before settling on the site it occupies today. Those moves, typical of several Chiquitano reductions in their first decades, came from the search for better land, water and healthier conditions for a fast-growing community: the Chiquitano, the most numerous people in the region, filled the mission in numbers that reached several thousand inhabitants.
After the Society of Jesus was expelled from the Spanish dominions in 1767, the Concepción mission, like the rest of the Chiquitano reductions, was left without its Jesuit organizers and passed to other administrations, first Franciscan and then secular. Unlike the celebrated Guaraní missions of the Río de la Plata basin, which fell into ruin after the expulsion and today are visited only as stone remains, the Chiquitos towns managed to endure as living communities, their Indigenous inhabitants keeping the churches, the traditions, the artistic trades and the extraordinary musical heritage inherited from the Jesuit workshops.
Through the 19th and 20th centuries, however, the church of Concepción and the others on the circuit suffered the passing of time, the tropical climate and structural decay: rotting roofs, worm-eaten columns, lost paintings. Their splendor was recovered only in the last quarter of the 20th century, through a restoration project that would end up shaping the region's recent history: that of the Swiss architect Hans Roth (1934-1999), a Jesuit lay brother who, after working on housing alongside Mother Teresa in India, arrived in Bolivia in 1972 for what was meant to be a six-month project and ended up devoting almost three decades of his life, until his death in 1999, to restoring the churches of San Javier, Concepción, San Rafael and San Miguel, among others.
In Concepción the restoration of the church ran between 1975 and 1982 —though Roth kept working in the region until the end of his life— and it was far more than maintenance work: it meant rebuilding entire structures, recovering carving and polychrome techniques that had almost been lost, and training local artisans again in trades their Chiquitano ancestors had practiced two centuries earlier in those same Jesuit workshops. Thanks to that community survival and to Roth's restoration, the church of Concepción regained its standing as a jewel of mission baroque. Today it is a living church, still in use, not a ruin, which is precisely one of the features that make the Chiquitano missions exceptional next to other Jesuit missions in South America.
In 1990 Unesco inscribed the group of six Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos, Concepción among them, on the World Heritage list, in recognition of the exceptional value of their baroque churches and of their character as a living ensemble, born of the encounter between European and Indigenous culture. The church of Concepción, for its beauty and its state of preservation, is among the most admired of the group.
Beyond its architecture, Concepción keeps the cultural inheritance of the missions alive. The tradition of Chiquitano baroque music —the repertoire preserved and reinterpreted by the communities— is still there, with schools, ensembles and a part in the International Baroque Music Festival 'Misiones de Chiquitos', which every two years fills the mission churches with concerts. The town also keeps its woodcarving workshops, heirs to the artistic skill of the reductions.
Today Concepción is an essential stop on the missions route and an important center in its region. Visiting it means admiring a masterpiece of mission baroque, walking a town that keeps the layout of the old reductions and looking into a living culture in which the Jesuit legacy and the Chiquitano inheritance are still beating, several centuries after the mission was founded.
The church of Concepción, raised around 1752-1756 under the direction of the Jesuit father and musician Martin Schmid —the Swiss architect and composer who was key in shaping the style of the Chiquitano missions—, is the emblem of the town and one of the high points of what is called mestizo baroque. Unlike the great stone churches of the altiplano, the Chiquitos churches are built of wood and adobe, with big gabled roofs held up by carved columns (horcones), designed for the tropical climate of the east.
What is extraordinary is the fusion of styles: onto the European structure and principles of the baroque, Chiquitano Indigenous artisans stamped their own sensibility, with plant motifs, angels, suns and local designs carved and painted in earth tones, ochres and gold. The decorated façade, the free-standing tower, the altars covered in gold leaf, the pulpit and the interior paintings make each church a compendium of art. In Concepción that ornamental richness reaches a particularly admired level.
This art was not merely decorative: it was part of an integrated project in which architecture, painting, carving and music combined to create an experience of faith and of beauty. The same workshops that produced the altarpieces trained the artisans whose descendants, several generations later, still carve wood in Concepción. That is why the church is not a frozen museum piece but the heart of an artistic culture that is still alive in the town.