San Ignacio Miní

Interesting facts

In 1631 slave raiders destroyed most of the Jesuit missions in the Guayrá region; San Ignacio and Loreto were the only two that held out before moving away.

The Jesuits trained and organised Guaraní militias to defend the missions against the raiding parties from São Paulo.

The red sandstone portals of the church are carved with angels, doves and local plants, worked by Guaraní stonemasons in the mission's own style.

The writer Horacio Quiroga came to the ruins in 1903 as photographer on Leopoldo Lugones's expedition, and later settled in the town of San Ignacio.

The house in San Ignacio where Quiroga later lived and wrote is now a museum dedicated to him.

The ruins first joined UNESCO's list as an extension of São Miguel das Missões in Brazil, which had been inscribed a year earlier, in 1983.

In 1996 San Ignacio Miní was placed on the very first World Monuments Watch, which led to the restoration of the church's eastern side portal.

A Guaraní community still lives near San Ignacio and grows ka'a he'ẽ, the sweet-leaved plant known around the world as stevia.

Why it is worth it

Thick walls of red sandstone standing among the trees of northeastern Argentina are what remain of San Ignacio Miní, one of the Jesuit mission towns founded among the Guaraní people in the seventeenth century. The ruins, in the Argentine province of Misiones, are among the best preserved of the dozens of missions that once spread across what is now Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, and since 1984 they have been part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with Santa Ana, Nuestra Señora de Loreto, Santa María la Mayor and São Miguel das Missões in Brazil.

The mission was first set up around 1610 by the Jesuit priests José Cataldino and Simón Maceta in the Guayrá region, in today's Brazilian state of Paraná. Raids by slave-hunting bandeirantes forced it to move in 1632, and it reached its present site only in 1696. The name Miní, Guaraní for small, distinguished it from the larger San Ignacio Guazú in Paraguay. In the eighteenth century around 3,000 people lived here, most of them Guaraní, producing crafts that were traded along the nearby Paraná River. The Jesuits left in 1768, after their expulsion from the Spanish dominions, and in 1817 Luso-Brazilian troops destroyed the town along with other missions in the region.

The plan followed the usual mission layout: a large central square framed by the church, the council house, the cemetery, the priests' residence and rows of Guaraní dwellings. The church, designed by the Italian Jesuit Juan Brasanelli, measured 74 by 24 metres, and its walls of local red sandstone are about two metres thick, which is why so much has survived two centuries of abandonment. Its carved stonework belongs to the style known as Guaraní baroque, which blended European forms with the work of the mission's own builders. Swallowed by forest, the ruins were rediscovered in 1897 and drew wider attention after the poet Leopoldo Lugones visited in 1903; systematic study began in 1940.

Getting there

The ruins stand at the edge of the town of San Ignacio, about 60 km northeast of Posadas, the capital of Misiones, along National Route 12. The nearest airport on the Argentine side is Posadas (PSS), about 46 km away in a straight line. The Paraguayan city of Encarnación and its airport (ENO) are closer as the crow flies but lie across the Paraná River and the international border.

From the encyclopaedia

San Ignacio Miní was one of the many missions founded in 1610 in Argentina, by the Jesuits in what the colonial Spaniards called the Province of Paraguay of the Americas during the Spanish colonial period. It is located near present-day San Ignacio valley, some 60 kilometers (37 mi) north of Posadas, Misiones Province, Argentina. In 1984, it was one of four reducciones in Argentina to be designated by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites.

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San Ignacio Miní

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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From the encyclopaedia