>> Jesuitic Debris. San Ignacio

Declared World Estate by the UNESCO as from the year 1984. They are formed by 30 towns with more than 100,000 guaraní Indians divided among Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.

They are two groups of missions built in the XVIIth century by Spanish priests, in order to teach the Gospel to the Indians. The first one is in Argentina, near the towns of Santa Ana, Loreto, and San Ignacio Miní, the most important one.

In Loreto, as in Santa Ana, which have not been restored, was the printing house where the first books edited in Argentina were printed. The second group is located in Brazil, in Santo Angelo and Sao Miguel das Missoes.

Regarding the San Ignacio Miní debris; it was built in 1632, and in a short period of time it became a real town, with a church, monastery, kitchens, lodgings, and workshops. The yellowish-gray of the stones contrasts with the green of the surrounding vegetation, and above all, the incredible proportions of the old mission, and especially of the church, over 60 meters long, shock you. The architecture style is the same in all the Jesuitic constructions, a combination of the colonial baroque with Indian elements of the guaraní culture.

Soon after the missionaries started their work in the areas of the Paraná and Guayrá, they continued to found towns up to the watershed of the Uruguay River, and then to the Tape and the Itatin. The Indians were reduced to groups that adopted, together with their teachings, the Gospel, work habits, and social organization ideas. But the populations near the Guayrá couldn't resist the attacks caused by the "mamelucos" or "bandeirantes" (inhabitants of Sao Paulo, now Brazil) whose object was to capture Indians to sell them as slaves.

In only four years 1627 - 1631, they destroyed nine towns, and 60,000 Indians were sold as slaves. This led Father Antonio Ruiz Montoya to organize the exodus of the rest of the inhabitants in those towns. A great fleet of canoes transporting more than 12,000 people along the Paraná River came to port in1631, after having suffered all kinds of catastrophes, in the margins of the Yabebiry Stream, and so the towns of Loreto and San Ignacio Miní were founded, in the land that now belongs to Argentina.

To those towns, other were added, that had had to emigrate from the Tape for the same reason (1634 - 1636), and from the Itatin (1669). So a great part of the activity in Misiones concentrated all along the margins of the Paraná and Uruguay rivers.