Key facts

• The Jesuit Reductions: the most ambitious experiment in cultural and religious synthesis in colonial South America — the Jesuit Reductions (“Reducciones”; the word means “gathering into order”) were communities of indigenous Amerindian peoples organized by Jesuit missionaries from the 1610s onward into a system of towns that combined Christian religious practice, indigenous communal social organization (the ayllu), and European craft and musical training; the Reductions were controversial from the start because they operated in a legal grey zone — they were formally within the Spanish colonial jurisdiction but were in practice autonomous communities under Jesuit direction, with no Spanish colonists, no encomienda (forced labour), and no alcohol; the most famous Reductions were the Guaraní Reductions in modern Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil (the subject of the film The Mission, 1986); the Chiquitos Reductions were established later (1691–1760) and survived the Jesuit expulsion of 1767 better than the Guaraní Reductions, because the Chiquitos communities had stronger local leadership and were less dependent on Jesuit authority for their day-to-day organisation
• Martin Schmid SJ (1694–1772), architect and musician: the defining figure of the Chiquitos mission heritage — Martin Schmid was a Swiss Jesuit lay brother from Baar (in the canton of Zug, Switzerland) who arrived in the Chiquitos region in 1730 and spent the next 37 years (until the Jesuit expulsion in 1767) designing the mission churches and developing the choral music programme; as an architect, Schmid designed 5 of the 6 surviving Chiquitos mission churches in a distinctive indigenous-Baroque style that adapted Spanish Baroque forms (triple-nave basilica plan, carved polychrome wooden altarpieces, twisted painted columns, figural polychrome wood sculpture) to local materials (tropical hardwood for the structural system and carved decorations; clay brick and lime plaster for the walls; thatched roofing replaced by ceramic tile in later restorations) and indigenous craft skills; the churches are unique in world architecture — neither purely Spanish Baroque nor purely indigenous, but a synthetic tradition that emerged from the specific encounter between the Jesuit mission system and the Chiquitos craftspeople; as a musician, Schmid composed sacred polyphonic music (masses, motets, vespers) in the Baroque style he had learned in Europe and taught the Chiquitos community a choral tradition that they maintained continuously after the Jesuit expulsion
• The music tradition and the “Misiones de Chiquitos” festival: the most extraordinary living musical heritage in South America — when the Bolivian musicologist Samuel Claro Valdés visited the Chiquitos missions in 1969, he discovered that the community choirs were still singing from 17th and 18th-century handwritten musical manuscripts (the “Jesuit Choir Books” of the Chiquitanía) that had been maintained in the mission churches since the Jesuit period; the manuscripts contained compositions by Domenico Zipoli (1688–1726; an Italian Jesuit composer who came to Argentina in 1716 and whose sacred works were transmitted throughout the Jesuit network) and by local Chiquitos composers; the discovery of this living tradition (a polyphonic choral tradition of European baroque music, maintained unbroken in a remote indigenous community in the Amazon basin for 250 years) was one of the most remarkable musicological discoveries of the 20th century; the biennial “Misiones de Chiquitos” early music festival (held in even-numbered years, typically April) now brings baroque music performers from across the world to perform the Chiquitos repertoire in the original mission churches; the acoustics of the colonial mission churches (designed by a musician) are superbly suited to choral music
• The Jesuit expulsion (1767) and the survival of the missions: the political crisis that paradoxically preserved the Chiquitos heritage — in 1767, King Charles III of Spain ordered the expulsion of all Jesuit missionaries from the Spanish Americas; the Guaraní Reductions of Paraguay and Argentina largely collapsed within a generation, as the communities lost their organizing structure and were exposed to the depredations of slave raiders and colonial administrators; the Chiquitos Reductions survived better because the Chiquitos communities had a more robust indigenous leadership structure and the missions were in a more remote and less economically attractive region; the mission churches were maintained by the communities through the subsequent centuries, though with varying degrees of care; a major international restoration effort (1972–2001; led by the Swiss architect Hans Roth, of the same canton as Martin Schmid) stabilised and restored all six surviving mission churches to approximately their original appearance; the restoration used traditional materials and techniques
• Heritage: UNESCO World Heritage Site, Jesuit Missions of the Chiquitos, inscribed 1990
• GPS: -16.2800° S, -62.5000° W (San Javier, the northernmost mission)