🇧🇴 Bolivia · Lowlands, the East and the Amazon
The Jesuit Missions of the Chiquitos are a group of old mission towns founded by the Society of Jesus in the 17th and 18th centuries in eastern Bolivia, famous for their extraordinary baroque wooden churches. Six of these missions were declared World Heritage Sites by UNESCO, in recognition of their architectural, historical and cultural value and as a unique case of fusion between European culture and that of the region's Indigenous peoples.
Unlike other Jesuit missions in South America, which are ruins today, the Chiquitos ones are living churches, restored and in use, with painted facades, gilded altars, carved columns and rich decoration. The missions on the World Heritage list are San Francisco Javier, Concepción, San Rafael, San Miguel, San José de Chiquitos and Santa Ana, with San Ignacio de Velasco as the region's hub.
This guide gathers the essentials of the Jesuit Missions of the Chiquitos: the circuit of mission towns, their churches, the baroque music tradition, how to tour them from Santa Cruz, where to sleep and eat, and practical advice for discovering one of Bolivia's most surprising cultural treasures.
The Chiquitos missions were founded by the Jesuits between the late 17th and the 18th centuries (from 1691, with San Javier) to evangelize and organize the Indigenous peoples of the east, creating self-governing communities known as 'reducciones'. In them, the Jesuits, notably the Swiss priest and architect Martin Schmid, who designed several of the churches and much of their music, combined European baroque architecture and art with the labor and sensibility of the Chiquitano people, producing a unique hybrid style, the so-called 'mestizo' or 'Chiquitano' baroque. After the Jesuits were expelled from Spanish territories in 1767, the missions carried on under other clergy and under the communities themselves, which is why, unlike the Guaraní missions now in ruins, the Chiquitano churches stayed in use. Restored between the 1970s and the 1990s under the direction of the architect Hans Roth, the churches regained their splendor. In 1990, UNESCO listed six of the missions as World Heritage. Today the missions are also a focus for the recovery of the extremely rich baroque musical heritage found in their archives. 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 1972, in a dusty loft in the church at Concepción, the Swiss architect Hans Roth found something nobody expected: more than five thousand pages of baroque scores, handwritten over two centuries earlier, stacked up amid termites and damp. They weren't ordinary European copies: they were masses, motets and operas composed or transcribed by Chiquitano Indigenous musicians trained by the Jesuits themselves, a repertoire believed lost forever. That discovery changed the region's story: from towns with half-forgotten, crumbling churches, Chiquitos became recognized as one of the great sanctuaries of American baroque, still alive in the voices and instruments of their descendants.
The story had begun almost three centuries earlier. In the late 17th century, the Society of Jesus launched one of the great missionary enterprises of colonial America in the Chiquitos region, in the east of what is now Bolivia. Between 1691 and the mid-18th century, the Jesuits founded a series of mission towns, San Francisco Javier (the first, in 1691), Concepción, San Rafael, San José, San Miguel, San Ignacio, Santa Ana and others, meant to evangelize and gather into communities the region's various Indigenous peoples, among them the Chiquitanos themselves, the Chiquitos and other lowland groups.
These towns, known as 'reducciones', were communities carefully laid out around a large square, with the church, the workshops, the houses and the communal areas. In them the Jesuits combined religious teaching with trades, farming, music and the arts, in a model that aimed at remarkable economic and social autonomy. The Chiquitos reducciones grew prosperous and relatively self-sufficient, with workshops for carpentry, ironwork, weaving and, above all, making musical instruments.
A distinctive feature of the Chiquitano missions was the integration of European culture with the traditions of the Indigenous peoples. That fusion found extraordinary expression in the architecture and, above all, in the music: the Chiquitanos learned and mastered European baroque music, and the mission workshops produced and preserved an extremely rich repertoire of scores, giving rise to a unique musical tradition that, against all odds, lives on today in the region's schools, choirs and children's orchestras.
Much of the artistic splendor of the Chiquitos missions is owed to a singular figure: the Swiss Jesuit Martin Schmid (1694-1772), born in Baar, canton of Zug, a priest, architect, musician and organ builder who arrived in Chiquitos in 1730 and stayed 37 years, until the order was expelled in 1767. He is credited with designing several of the great mission churches, among them San Francisco Javier, San Rafael de Velasco and Concepción, and with organizing the entire musical life of the reducciones. Few embodied so completely the Jesuit idea of evangelizing through beauty, art and music.
His first task at San Javier, barely off the road, was to introduce baroque polyphony: he brought copies of scores by the Italian composer Domenico Zipoli from Córdoba (in present-day Argentina, another great Jesuit musical center) and a dismantled organ from Potosí, which he used as a model for building instruments in the mission workshops. Over the years Schmid trained instrument makers, organists and copyists among the Chiquitanos, and the workshops came to produce violins, harps, organs and other instruments of a quality that astonished European visitors of the day.
The churches he designed gave shape to a style of its own, known as 'mestizo baroque' or 'Chiquitano baroque': basilica-plan buildings made mostly of wood, with great turned columns of cuchi (an extremely hard local timber), trussed roofs, decorated facades and, above all, lavish interior ornamentation of gilded altarpieces, pulpits, wall paintings and motifs mixing the European baroque repertoire with elements of Indigenous flora, fauna and sensibility. The result was a sacred architecture unique in the Americas, perfectly adapted to the materials and climate of eastern Bolivia.
In music, Schmid and other Jesuits taught the Chiquitanos singing, instruments and baroque composition, and the mission workshops came to make instruments and to copy and create scores of their own, with Indigenous authors composing their own masses and motets in the style they had learned. That work laid the foundations of the extraordinary musical heritage that, preserved almost by chance in the mission archives for two centuries, would be rediscovered in the 20th century and give Chiquitos its world fame as a land of living baroque.
In 1767, King Charles III of Spain decreed the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from all crown territories, a measure that hit missions across Spanish America, Chiquitos included. Martin Schmid, by then an old man, had to leave the towns he had built and returned to Europe, where he died in 1772. The Jesuits' departure was a hard blow to the reducciones, which lost their organizers and guides and passed into the hands of other religious and civil authorities.
Yet, unlike what happened to the famous Guaraní missions of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, which emptied out and fell into ruin after the expulsion, reduced to stone remains under the undergrowth, the towns of Chiquitos managed to survive. Their Indigenous communities went on living in the missions, keeping their churches, their traditions and, remarkably, their musical heritage, which allowed the Jesuit legacy to survive as a living thing to this day, even as the churches deteriorated under damp, termites and two centuries of time.
That continuity is what makes the Chiquitano missions exceptional: they aren't archaeological ruins but living towns with churches in use. The turning point came in 1972, when another Swiss, the architect Hans Roth, settled in Concepción to lead an ambitious restoration program. Roth and his team not only shored up and recovered the wooden structures of the churches: in the process they found, stored in lofts and storerooms, more than five thousand folios of handwritten scores from the 17th and 18th centuries, today kept in the Archivo Musical de Chiquitos in Concepción, along with remains of the original instruments now displayed in the town's Museo Arquidiocesano. That double discovery, architectural and musical, was what made the UNESCO listing possible years later.
The exceptional value of the Chiquitano missions was recognized by UNESCO in 1990, when it inscribed on the World Heritage list the group of six missions: San Francisco Javier, Concepción, Santa Ana, San Miguel, San Rafael and San José de Chiquitos. The listing recognizes both the architectural value of the churches, outstanding examples of mission baroque, mostly wooden and lavishly decorated, and their singularity as a living ensemble, born of the encounter between European and Indigenous culture.
One of the missions' most vibrant legacies is their musical tradition. The mission archives preserved an immensely valuable repertoire of baroque music, and the communities kept the practice of playing it alive across generations. That heritage of sound is celebrated today at the International Baroque Music Festival 'Misiones de Chiquitos', which every two years fills the mission churches with concerts and draws musicians and audiences from around the world, turning baroque into a present, thrilling experience.
Today the Jesuit Missions of the Chiquitos are one of Bolivia's great cultural treasures and a destination that combines history, art, spirituality and music. Walking their towns and stepping into their decorated churches is a glimpse of one of the most extraordinary experiments of the American colonial period: a missionary utopia that, against all odds, is still alive in the heart of eastern Bolivia.