São Miguel das Missões

A tall stone façade stands alone on a grassy plain in the far south of Brazil, its arched portal and single bell tower glowing reddish in the late sun. These are the remains of São Miguel Arcanjo, one of the Jesuit missions that once gathered thousands of Guarani people into planned towns across the borderlands of present-day Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.

The mission was founded in 1632 by the Jesuit fathers Cristóvão de Mendoza and Pablo Benevidez, and in 1687 it was re-established on its present site. It grew quickly: more than 4,000 people lived here by 1690, and at its height the population approached 7,000. The church whose ruins dominate the site was designed by the Italian Jesuit architect Giovanni Battista Primoli and built between 1735 and 1750 from local sandstone, in a Baroque idiom adapted to the materials and skills available on the frontier. Its construction ended just as the Treaty of Madrid of 1750 transferred the territory from Spain to Portugal and ordered the Guarani to leave. They refused, and the Guarani War that followed in the 1750s, in which the mission's corregidor Sepé Tiaraju became the best-remembered leader of the resistance, ended with defeat, fire and the gradual abandonment of the town.

Interest in the ruins returned in the twentieth century. In 1937 the modernist architect Lúcio Costa studied the site, it was listed as a national monument in 1938, and the stabilisation of the remains was followed by the Museu das Missões, a simple pavilion designed by Costa and completed in 1940 to house religious images from the mission period. In 1983 São Miguel was inscribed by UNESCO, and a year later the listing was extended to four Argentine missions under the joint name Jesuit Missions of the Guaranis.

Getting there

The ruins lie beside the small town of São Miguel das Missões in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. The nearest city is Santo Ângelo, about 40 km away in a straight line. The nearest airport is Santo Ângelo Airport (GEL), about 48 km away.