Jesuit Missions of La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná and Jesús de Tavarangüé
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. How many people have stood at a site or want to go will be shown once enough people use the app.
Seals, your want-to-go list and the year you stood here are kept in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
These two missions in the Itapúa Department of southern Paraguay are the remains of reducciones, villages built by the Jesuits in the 17th and 18th centuries to convert the Guaraní of the Río de la Plata basin to Christianity. The Jesuits founded about 30 such missions in what are now Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia.
Jesús de Tavarangue was founded in 1685 by the Jesuit Jerónimo Delfín and moved several times before settling at its present site in 1760. Trinidad was founded in June 1706 and had about 3,000 Guaraní inhabitants by 1728. Its church and town plan were designed by the architect Juan Bautista Prímoli; the church is the largest built in any of the reducciones and is known for its frieze of angels playing musical instruments.
In 1767 King Carlos III of Spain expelled the Jesuits, and the church being built at Jesús, planned at 70 by 24 metres, was left unfinished. The missions were abandoned and fell into decay, and at Trinidad all but one of the statues were beheaded by people who believed there was gold inside the heads. The two ruins were inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1993.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).