The Most Beautiful Churches in South America
10 places in 5 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful churches in South America are Church of San Francisco, Castro (Chile), São Francisco Church and Convent, Salvador (Brazil) and Church of Cristo Obrero, Atlántida (Uruguay). The list covers 10 churches in 5 countries. Brazil has the most, with 6. Last updated 13 October 2026.
South America's churches were shaped by the meeting of European architecture and local craftsmanship. Spanish and Portuguese orders brought the baroque, but the carving, gilding and painting were often done by Indigenous, mestizo and African artisans, who added their own motifs and colours. The gold of Brazil's Minas Gerais paid for interiors covered in gilded woodwork, and in the twentieth century the continent produced some of the most original modern churches anywhere.
Brazil leads in baroque richness. The São Francisco Church in Salvador is lined almost entirely with gilded carving, and the Capela Dourada in Recife is a golden chapel of the Franciscan Third Order. In Minas Gerais, the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos at Congonhas is fronted by twelve soapstone prophets carved by Aleijadinho, who also designed the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi in Ouro Preto, whose ceiling was painted by Manuel da Costa Ataíde. The parish church of Saint Antony in Tiradentes glows with gilded altars, and Oscar Niemeyer's Church of Saint Francis of Assisi at Pampulha replaced the baroque with concrete curves and tiles by Candido Portinari.
In Quito, La Compañía de Jesús is famous for its interior covered in gold leaf, and the Church of San Pedro in Andahuaylillas, near Cusco, is known as the Sistine Chapel of the Andes for its painted walls and ceilings. On the island of Chiloé in Chile, the Church of San Francisco in Castro is built of wood and painted yellow and violet. In Uruguay, Eladio Dieste's Church of Cristo Obrero at Atlántida uses undulating walls of brick that rise and fall like waves.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Church of San Francisco, Castro | Church building | Chile | ✓ |
| 2 | São Francisco Church and Convent, Salvador | Church building | Brazil | |
| 3 | Church of Cristo Obrero, Atlántida | Church building | Uruguay | ✓ |
| 4 | Church of Saint Francis of Assisi (Pampulha) | Church building | Brazil | |
| 5 | Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos | Church building | Brazil | ✓ |
| 6 | La Compañía de Jesús, Quito | Church building | Ecuador | |
| 7 | Church of Saint Francis of Assisi (Ouro Preto) | Church building | Brazil | |
| 8 | Capela Dourada | Church building | Brazil | |
| 9 | Iglesia de San Pedro, Andahuaylillas | Church building | Peru | |
| 10 | Mother Church of Saint Anthony, Tiradentes | Church building | Brazil |
01 Church of San Francisco, Castro
Iglesia de San Francisco
Chile · 0.1 km from Castro42.481° S 73.764° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Rjcastillo · CC BY-SA 4.0 This building is the odd one out among the sixteen Chiloé churches on the UNESCO list. The others follow the island's own school of wooden architecture; San Francisco was designed by the Italian architect Eduardo Provasoli in a Gothic Revival idiom and built between 1910 and 1912 under the direction of the friar Ángel Custodio Subiabre. Chilote carpenters led by Salvador Sierpe raised it in native timber such as alerce, Guaitecas cypress and coigüe, with interiors of raulí and olivillo, and then sheathed the exterior and roof in galvanised iron. During construction, in August 1911, a storm brought the unfinished structure down and it had to be started again.
Did you know? The church is 54 metres long and 25 metres wide, with a central nave 16 metres high beneath its wooden vault.
02 São Francisco Church and Convent, Salvador
Igreja e Convento de São Francisco
Brazil · 3 km from Salvador12.975° S 38.509° W
Wellington Da Costa Gomez · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Franciscans came to Salvador in 1587, but their first convent and church were destroyed during the Dutch invasions of Bahia in the following century. Rebuilding began on a grand scale under Father Vicente das Chagas in 1686; the present church was laid out from 1708 and structurally finished by 1723, and the decoration of its interior went on for decades, most of it complete by 1755. Unusually for a Franciscan house in north-east Brazil, the church has three aisles rather than one, and the stone was Bahian sandstone, not the Portuguese limestone used elsewhere in the city.
Did you know? The cloister tiles may have been made by Portuguese artists working in the Netherlands, probably in Delft, according to the art historian Thijs Weststeijn.
03 Church of Cristo Obrero, Atlántida
Iglesia de Cristo Obrero y Nuestra Señora de Lourdes
Uruguay34.744° S 55.766° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
María Beatriz Rodriguez · CC BY-SA 3.0 The effect is clearest in the long side walls, which undulate in gentle waves, rising from straight lines at the ground to deep curves at the top where they meet the roof. The roof itself is a sequence of Gaussian vaults — double-curved brick shells that carry their own weight through their form, with no beams or columns inside. From outside the building is a simple rectangle; from inside it becomes a single flowing space in which the walls and ceiling seem to move together. Everywhere the brick is left exposed, and its warm colour fills the nave.
Did you know? Each wavy wall is a double skin of brick with a cavity filled with mortar and thin steel wire, built up along guide lines that set the curves.
04 Church of Saint Francis of Assisi (Pampulha)
Igreja São Francisco de Assis
Brazil · 8.9 km from Belo Horizonte19.858° S 43.979° W
Bernardo Gouvêa · CC BY-SA 3.0 The chapel belonged to a leisure district that Juscelino Kubitschek, then mayor of Belo Horizonte and later president of Brazil, commissioned around Lake Pampulha: a casino (now the Pampulha Art Museum), a dance hall known as the Casa do Baile, a yacht club and this church, with gardens by Roberto Burle Marx and structural engineering by Joaquim Cardozo. Inside, Portinari painted the mural behind the altar, showing Saint Francis with a wolf that looks more like a dog, and the fourteen Stations of the Cross; Alfredo Ceschiatti made the bronze reliefs of the baptistery.
Did you know? Niemeyer cited the poet Paul Claudel's idea of a church as God's hangar on earth; Time magazine reported the archbishop likened it to a bomb shelter for the devil.
05 Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos
Santuário do Bom Jesus de Matosinhos
Brazil · 19.4 km from Conselheiro Lafaiete20.508° S 43.861° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by bea_marques from Pixabay The church is a single-nave colonial Baroque building with a richly gilded Rococo interior, but what draws most visitors is outside. A monumental terrace with curving double staircases, built between 1777 and 1790, was later populated with twelve Old Testament prophets carved in soapstone by Aleijadinho and his workshop between 1800 and 1805. Set on the parapets against the sky, their gesturing figures work as architecture as much as sculpture and have become the best-known image of Brazilian Baroque art.
Did you know? According to legend, the original Bom Jesus image washed ashore at Matosinhos in Portugal in the year 124 and was carved by Nicodemus.
06 La Compañía de Jesús, Quito
Iglesia de la Compañía
Ecuador · 1.6 km from Quito0.221° S 78.514° W
Ranoutofusername · CC BY-SA 4.0 Its building took the Jesuits a century and a half. Work began in earnest in 1605 on plans sent from Rome, and the Italian Jesuit Marcos Guerra, who arrived in 1636, gave the church its Renaissance bones: the barrel-vaulted nave, the side chapels under small domes, the great dome over the crossing, about 27 m high and lit by twelve windows. The plan recalls the Gesù in Rome, though with three naves instead of one. Because the site was cut by a ravine running down from Pichincha volcano, Guerra first had to bridge it with brick arches to create level ground. The facade came last: begun by Leonardo Deubler in 1722, abandoned three years later and finished by Venancio Gandolfi in 1765.
Did you know? The gold leaf used inside is 23-carat, applied over the red ground that gives the interior its warm glow.
07 Church of Saint Francis of Assisi (Ouro Preto)
Igreja de São Francisco de Assis (Ouro Preto)
Brazil20.387° S 43.503° W
Sarah and Iain · CC BY 2.0 Look first at the facade. Instead of the usual square towers, two round bell towers flank the front, giving the building a soft, curving silhouette against the hills. Above the single doorway Aleijadinho carved a soapstone frontispiece crowned by a relief of Saint Francis receiving the stigmata, and where a window would normally be there is a round oculus filled with a relief instead — both unusual in the religious architecture of colonial Brazil. Carved in the local soapstone, the ornament still reads with remarkable crispness two and a half centuries on.
Did you know? According to tradition, Ataíde used his own wife as the model for the Virgin, which is why she appears with mixed-race features.
08 Capela Dourada
Brazil · 3.5 km from Recife8.062° S 34.877° W
Wilfredor · CC0 The chapel belongs to the Third Order of Saint Francis and was built as the Chapel of the Novices (Capela dos Noviços) beside the Franciscan Convent of Santo Antônio. Its cornerstone was laid on 13 May 1696, it was opened on 15 September 1697, and work on its decoration went on until 1724. The Portuguese captain Antônio Fernandes de Matos directed the construction. Luís Machado worked on the ceiling and arches, and Antônio Martins Santiago carved the main chapel in 1698. Unnamed painters supplied the oil panels of the coffered ceiling around 1700, showing saints and personifications of virtues such as Faith, Hope and Charity, while azulejo panels line the side walls.
Did you know? One side altar holds a life-size figure of the Lord of the Steps, Christ carrying the cross, set with inlaid rubies.
09 Iglesia de San Pedro, Andahuaylillas
Iglesia de San Pedro (Andahuaylillas)
Peru · 35.9 km from Cuzco13.674° S 71.678° W
Szacsa82 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The church was probably built in the late sixteenth century, possibly over an earlier Inca shrine, since remains of Inca walls survive inside. It has a single nave with side chapels and thick mud-brick walls. Its outward style is a provincial Renaissance, while the interior belongs fully to the Baroque. The ceiling is covered in a gilded Mudéjar-style coffering of flowers and fruit, and gilded frames bind paintings and wall decoration into one glittering whole. Much of the painting is the work of Luis de Riaño, a painter born in Lima in 1596 who trained under Angelino Medoro and settled in Cusco; one of his murals carries the date 1626.
Did you know? Below the mouth of hell in the same mural, almost hidden, are small Andean figures in a canoe, one in an Inca-style checkerboard tunic and one drinking chicha.
10 Mother Church of Saint Anthony, Tiradentes
Igreja Matriz de Santo Antônio
Brazil · 7.8 km from São João del Rei21.110° S 44.178° W
Ricardo André Frantz · CC BY 3.0 The interior is a cave of carved and gilded wood. Between 1739 and 1750 the Portuguese carver João Ferreira Sampaio created the altarpieces, wall linings and throne of the chancel in the Joanine style, named after King João V of Portugal, with twisting Solomonic columns, garlands, shells and scrolls; the ceiling panels are painted in tempera and gold leaf. The choir stalls with spiral columns, by Pedro Monteiro de Souza, date from about 1740, and the inlaid wooden floor from 1774. In the choir loft stands a Portuguese Rococo pipe organ installed around 1788, its case painted by Manuel Vítor de Jesus.
Did you know? Its first walls were raised in wattle and daub, with wooden frames packed with adobe, before the church was gradually enlarged over the eighteenth century.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful churches in South America?
- On our list, Church of San Francisco, Castro (Chile) ranks first, followed by São Francisco Church and Convent, Salvador (Brazil) and Church of Cristo Obrero, Atlántida (Uruguay).
- Which country has the most churches in South America?
- In our collection, the most come from Brazil (6), Chile (1) and Ecuador (1).
- Who was Aleijadinho?
- Antônio Francisco Lisboa, known as Aleijadinho, was an eighteenth-century sculptor and architect from Minas Gerais and the leading figure of Brazilian baroque. His soapstone prophets at Congonhas and his work in Ouro Preto are considered his masterpieces.
- Why are the churches of Chiloé built of wood?
- Jesuit and later Franciscan missionaries in the Chiloé archipelago worked with local carpenters who used the abundant native timber and shipbuilding techniques. Sixteen of these churches are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- What is unusual about the Church of Cristo Obrero?
- Eladio Dieste built it from reinforced brick, with walls and a roof that undulate in waves. Completed in 1960, it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021.
- How many churches are on this list in South America?
- The list covers 10 churches in 5 countries. Brazil has the most, with 6.