Jesuit reductions of the Chiquitos

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Mission Church of San Francisco Javier
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As an ensemble of Jesuit missions of the Chiquitos , UNESCO named six cities in the Santa Cruz Department in eastern Bolivia as World Heritage Sites in 1990 :

  • Location of the Jesuit missions of the Chiquitos with today's border

  • Area map of the indigenous peoples of Bolivia

The six cities protected as world cultural heritage are the last remaining settlements of this kind in Bolivia. Others exist in Argentina , Brazil and Paraguay .

Some of the six missions are located several hundred kilometers apart to the east and northeast of Santa Cruz de la Sierra .

history

Influenced by the idea of ​​the ideal city by European philosophers of the 16th century , the Jesuits founded several settlements in the Chiquitos area between 1696 and 1790 for indigenous people evangelized to Christianity, the so-called Jesuit reductions . In them, the Christian architecture mixed with the traditional local architecture to create a style of its own. Most of the Chiquitos churches were designed by the Swiss Jesuit Martin Schmid .

The Mission San José de Chiquitos was founded around 1750 just a few kilometers from the site where the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra was between 1560 and 1592 , before it was moved about 250 km west to its current location in 1592 . The remains of this settlement can be visited in the south of the city of San José as the archaeological excavation site Santa Cruz la Vieja ("Old Santa Cruz").

See also

Web links

Commons : Jesuit Missions of the Chiquitos  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 16 ° 0 ′ 0 ″  S , 60 ° 30 ′ 0 ″  W.