Jesuit Mission of La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The musician angels of the church frieze play instruments such as the clavichord, pipe organ, trumpets, flute and Paraguayan harp.
- Until musical scores were found in the Bolivian missions of Moxos, the angel frieze at Trinidad was the main surviving evidence of music in the Jesuit missions.
- All but one of the church's statues lost their heads, after a belief spread that gold had been hidden inside them.
- The stone pulpit is decorated with figures of the Evangelists, and traces of the original colour can still be seen on it.
- Carved stone rosettes decorate the lintels, and sculpted fragments show flowers and fruits of the region's own vegetation.
- A solid square tower stands at some distance from the main church and may have been the belfry of an earlier temporary church or a lookout.
- Near the centre of the church is a stone crypt, partly rebuilt, where some of the mission's leading clergy were buried.
- Trinidad was one of the last reductions founded in the Paraná region, and its ruins were rediscovered almost two centuries after being abandoned.
Why it is worth it
The sandstone church at La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná is the largest temple ever raised in the Jesuit missions of South America, and its surviving walls still carry a carved frieze of angels caught in the act of making music, each holding an instrument. Trinidad was the most ambitious of the roughly thirty "reductions" the Jesuits founded among the Guaraní across what are now Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia, and together with nearby Jesús de Tavarangue it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993.
The mission was founded in 1706 by Guaraní families who came from the older mission of San Carlos, today in Argentina. The Jesuit architect Juan Bautista Prímoli designed the main church and the plan of the whole settlement, which was conceived as a self-sufficient town. Everything was arranged around a broad central plaza used for processions, festivals and weddings: the great church and its cemetery and orchards on one side, a school and workshops nearby, and long rows of stone-arched dwellings for the Guaraní facing the square. By 1728 around 3,000 people lived here.
Much of the finest work is in the details. The stone pulpit is assembled from more than a thousand carved pieces, and a carved baptismal font survives, together with sacristy doorways showing Portuguese and Hispanic influences. Fragments of sculpture, carved sandstone with traces of plant-based pigments, and a scale model of the mission are kept in the former sacristy. After the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish colonies in the late 1760s, the community dwindled and the town was abandoned; the ruins have since been stabilised and restored.
Getting there
The ruins stand in the district of Trinidad, Itapúa Department, about 28 km from Encarnación, a short distance off national Route 6. The nearest airport is the international airport serving Encarnación (ENO), about 17 km away.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- San Ignacio Miní 21.7 km · ruins
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná, or the Most Holy Trinity of Paraná, is the name of a former Jesuit reduction in Paraguay. It is an example of one of the many Jesuit reductions, small colonies established by the missionaries in various locations in South America, such as Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay throughout the 17th and 18th century. These missions were built as self-contained societies that existed outside of regular Spanish colonial life that integrated indigenous populations with Christian faith.
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