Thirty Jesuit-Guaraní missions were built across what is now Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil between 1609 and 1767. Eight of them were in Paraguay, and five are worth going to see. They are strung along a 200-kilometre arc through Itapúa and Misiones, and the sensible way to take them in is the road between Encarnación and San Ignacio Guazú.
Two are ruins on the UNESCO list. Trinidad is the largest and best preserved of all of them, in red sandstone, with its carved frieze of angels playing baroque instruments still on the church wall. Jesús de Tavarangüé, half an hour north, was still being built when the order was expelled and was never finished — three enormous Moorish arches standing in a field.
The other three are living towns that grew up around their missions and never stopped. San Ignacio Guazú was the first, founded in 1609, and has the best museum of Guaraní baroque woodcarving in the country. Santa María de Fe is a village around a grass plaza where howler monkeys live in the trees, with a museum of some sixty carved figures. San Cosme y Damián has the mission where Buenaventura Suárez built an observatory and calculated eclipses from the southern sky, and runs an astronomical centre on the strength of it.
What the missions actually were is stranger than the ruins suggest. They were self-governing indigenous communities under Jesuit direction, producing food, crafts and music at a level that astonished European visitors — at their height they housed over 100,000 Guaraní. Guaraní craftsmen carved the saints and built the instruments; Guaraní, not Spanish, was the language of administration. Spain and Portugal wanted the land and the labour, and the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish Empire in 1767. Within a lifetime the missions were roofless.
One ticket, 25,000 guaraníes, covers Trinidad, Jesús and San Cosme, and is valid three days. Encarnación is the usual base for the first three; San Ignacio Guazú and Santa María de Fe are better reached from Asunción, or taken on the way south.
