San Ignacio Mini Jesuit Mission

UNESCO World Heritage Site (Jesuit Missions Of The Guaranis, 1983/84), Shared With Santa Ana, Loreto And Santa Maria La Mayor In Argentina And Sao Miguel Das Missoes In Brazil · San Ignacio, Misiones

San Ignacio Mini is the best-preserved of the Jesuit missions the Guarani built in what is now north-east Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Jesuits gathered Guarani communities into planned towns, protecting them from slave raiders while converting them, and at its height this mission housed several thousand people around a great plaza. When the Jesuits were expelled in 1767 the towns emptied, and the forest took them. What stands now, restored in the 1940s, is the red sandstone shell of the church with its carved portal, the rows of Guarani houses, the cloister and the cemetery, all in the distinctive Guarani baroque, where European designs were carved by local hands and local plants and faces crept into the stone. A museum at the entrance tells the story, and an evening sound-and-light show brings the plaza alive. The site is four hours south of Iguazu and one hour from Posadas, and most visitors come on the way between them, which is the right way to see it.

Calle Alberdi, San Ignacio, Misiones, San Ignacio, Misiones, N3322, Argentina

The ruins open daily in daylight hours; confirm current times. A sound-and-light show is staged some evenings. A single ticket has traditionally covered the four Argentine missions in the listing over a set number of days.

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