🇧🇴 Bolivia · Lowlands, the East and the Amazon
San Javier (or San Xavier) holds a place of honor in the Chiquitania: it was the first of the Jesuit missions the Society of Jesus founded in these lowlands, in 1691, and the cradle of the extraordinary Chiquitano baroque music tradition. Its church, the work of the Jesuit architect and musician Martin Schmid, is a gem of mestizo baroque, with its carved tower, its great gallery of columns and an interior richly decorated with natural pigments.
But San Javier is more than its church. The town keeps the serene air of the old reductions, with its plaza and its houses with galleries, and the surroundings invite you outdoors: waterfalls such as the Tumbos del Suruquizo, hot springs, caves and viewpoints deep in the Chiquitano forest. It is also cattle and cheese country, with a processing plant that was a pioneer in Bolivia and where you can watch criollo cheese being made up close.
This guide covers the essentials of San Javier with a practical eye: its mission church (part of the UNESCO World Heritage ensemble), its musical legacy, the waterfalls and hot springs nearby, the cheese-making experience, how to get there and fit it into the mission circuit, where to sleep and eat, and tips for discovering this first Chiquitano reduction.
San Javier (San Francisco Xavier) was the first Jesuit mission of Chiquitos, founded on December 31, 1691 by fathers José de Arce and Antonio de Ribas. The whole system of Chiquitano reductions spread out from here. In 1730 the Swiss Jesuit Martin Schmid —architect, musician and builder of mission churches— founded in San Javier the region's first music school and first instrument workshop, laying the foundations of the 'mission baroque'. The current baroque church was raised by Schmid between 1749 and 1752. After the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, the Chiquitano communities kept their churches and their music. In 1990 UNESCO declared the ensemble of the Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos a World Heritage Site. 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.
Read the history of Santa Cruz →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In San Javier, the kids in the choir read baroque scores written almost three centuries ago the way you inherit a family trade, and violins are still made in the town's workshops. That this happens in a cattle town in the dry forest of eastern Bolivia is no accident: everything started here. At the end of the 17th century, the eastern lowlands of what is now Bolivia —the Chiquitania— were a remote frontier of the Spanish empire, home to many Indigenous peoples speaking different languages, whom the conquerors had lumped together under the generic name 'chiquitos': a hot region of dry forest, of great distances and difficult access, where the colonial presence had until then been fleeting and precarious.
Into that setting, the Society of Jesus launched one of its most ambitious missionary projects in South America. After the experience of the celebrated reductions of Paraguay, the Jesuits decided to extend their model to Chiquitos: self-sufficient communities —the reductions— where Indigenous people from different nations were gathered together to be evangelized and organized around faith, work, craft, farming and music, with a high degree of autonomy from civil colonial power.
The starting point of that whole enterprise was San Javier. On December 31, 1691, the Jesuit fathers José de Arce and Antonio de Ribas founded the mission of San Francisco Xavier, the first reduction of Chiquitos. From it, over the following decades, the entire Chiquitano mission system would spread: San Rafael, San José, Concepción, San Miguel, Santa Ana, San Ignacio de Velasco and others. San Javier thus opened one of the most original cultural experiments in colonial America.
If San Javier is the starting point of the Chiquitano missions, it is also the cradle of one of their most astonishing legacies: the musical baroque. The key figure was the Swiss Jesuit Martin Schmid (1694–1772), an extraordinary man who was architect, builder and musician all in one. Schmid reached Chiquitos in the first half of the 18th century and left a mark that still defines the region's identity today.
In 1730, Martin Schmid founded in San Javier the first music school and the first musical instrument workshop of the Chiquitania. His first task was to introduce baroque polyphony: he brought copies of scores by the Italian composer Domenico Zipoli from Córdoba and a disassembled organ from Potosí as a model for building other instruments. He composed and arranged religious pieces, made instruments and taught Indigenous children to read music and to play. Out of that work came a style of its own, the 'mission baroque', which was not a simple copy of European models but a new way of conceiving music, born of the encounter between the European tradition and Chiquitano sensibility.
Schmid was also the great architect of the mission churches. In San Javier he raised the current baroque church between 1749 and 1752, a masterpiece of mestizo baroque with its carved tower, its great gallery of columns and its interior decorated with mission motifs and natural pigments. Schmid himself later designed the churches of Concepción and San Rafael, among others. His work combined European Catholic architecture with local techniques and motifs, giving the missions of Chiquitos their unmistakable artistic stamp.
The church Martin Schmid built in San Javier between 1749 and 1752 is the heart of the town and one of the great gems of American mestizo baroque. Unlike the stone church of San José de Chiquitos, the church of San Javier is made of wood, with great carved columns holding up its gallery and roof, and a bell tower that stands out for its height and its carvings. The interior displays rich mural decoration with mission motifs made from natural pigments, a carved staircase and ornate altars.
The church was the center of a community organized with remarkable complexity. Around the plaza stood the Indigenous dwellings, the workshops for carpentry, carving, silverwork and instrument making, the schools and the work spaces. Music held a central place in daily and liturgical life: choirs and orchestras of children and young people accompanied the celebrations, and the baroque repertoire was copied and performed constantly.
This organization turned the reductions of Chiquitos into true 'ideal cities' in the middle of the bush, where evangelization, craft work, farming and a singular artistic flowering lived side by side. San Javier, as the first and model mission, was a benchmark for that system for decades, until a distant event came to change everything.
In 1767, King Charles III of Spain decreed the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from all his dominions, and the Jesuits had to abandon the missions of Chiquitos as well. The fathers' departure could have meant the end of the mission system, as happened with so many reductions in Paraguay and Argentina, which emptied out and fell into ruin.
In the Chiquitania, however, something different happened. The Indigenous communities took over the care of their towns, their churches and their traditions. The Chiquitanos went on celebrating their feasts, keeping up their confraternities and, decisively, preserving and passing on their music. Generation after generation, local musicians kept copying, performing and safeguarding the baroque repertoire inherited from the Jesuits, without the outside world being fully aware of it.
Thanks to that continuity, the missions of Chiquitos are not ruins today but living churches still in use, with a musical and craft culture in permanent activity. San Javier kept its church, its music school and its identity as the first reduction. That intangible heritage —the music above all— would be rediscovered and valued by the world over the course of the 20th century, turning the Chiquitania into an international reference point for the American baroque.
During the 20th century, the Chiquitano mission churches, battered by the tropical climate and the passing of time, were the object of a major restoration campaign led by the Swiss architect Hans Roth between the 1970s and the 1990s. Roth and his team recovered the churches —among them San Javier's— using conservation criteria and with the participation of the communities, restoring their baroque splendor.
That effort culminated in 1990, when UNESCO inscribed on its World Heritage list the ensemble of the Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos, made up of six mission towns —San Francisco Xavier among them—, valued as an exceptional testimony to the fusion of European and Indigenous American culture. San Javier, the first of them all, was thus recognized at the highest level of world heritage.
In parallel, the rediscovery of the enormous archive of baroque scores kept in the Chiquitania gave rise, at the end of the 20th century, to the International Festival of American Renaissance and Baroque Music 'Misiones de Chiquitos', held in even-numbered years and touring the mission towns with concerts in their churches. San Javier is one of the leading venues, true to its standing as the cradle of the mission baroque. Today the town combines that legacy with the region's cattle and cheese life and with growing cultural and nature tourism, keeping the heritage of the first mission of Chiquitos alive more than three centuries after its founding.