San Ignacio de Velasco

The Jesuit mission of San Ignacio was founded in 1748 by the missionaries Diego Contreras and Michael Streicher, partly with survivors of San Ignacio de Zamucos, a mission to the south that had been abandoned three years earlier. Work on its church began on 31 July 1748, the feast of St Ignatius of Loyola. The Swiss Jesuit Martin Schmid, the architect and musician behind several Chiquitos churches, designed its altarpiece, said to be the finest in the Chiquitania, and the church became the largest and richest in the region. As in the other missions, farming was the basis of life, and lagoons and dams were built to hold water.

In 1767 King Charles III expelled the Jesuits from the Spanish empire, and they left the mission the following year. Unlike most former Jesuit missions in South America, the Chiquitos towns did not fall into ruin, and San Ignacio later became the seat of the Catholic Church in the Chiquitania and the capital of Velasco province.

The great church did not survive. By 1948 it threatened to collapse and was demolished. While the other mission churches were being restored in a project begun by the Swiss architect Hans Roth in 1972, a new church was built here on the old design, completed in July 2000 and furnished with the original altarpieces. Because it is a reconstruction rather than a restoration, it was left out of the UNESCO listing of 1990. In the 20th century Mennonite farming colonies were founded nearby, and the town grew into the largest in the Chiquitania.

San Ignacio is a meeting point of cultures. Chiquitano, in a local dialect known as Ignaciano, is the most common Indigenous language of the town and its surroundings, the lowland camba identity of Santa Cruz is strong, and the nearness of Brazil brings Portuguese words into everyday speech. Mennonite colonies on the edge of town farm and raise cattle and keep their own German dialect.

Music is the great inheritance of the missions. The Jesuits taught European music to the Chiquitano, and the scores copied in the missions survive in an archive of thousands of pages. San Ignacio's municipal school of choir, baroque music and folk ballet trains children and young people between 8 and 18 to play these works on violin and cello, and they perform at the international festival of American baroque and Renaissance music held across the mission towns every two years. At Carnival a traditional town band plays the lowland rhythms that locals see as part of their camba identity.

Crafts are another link with the mission past. Wood carving is the best known, from framed pictures to spoons and the small Chiquitano angels sold as souvenirs, and leather work and weaving are shown at the October festival of Velasco traditions. The town's anniversary on 31 July is marked with a civic ceremony and folk dances.

The 2024 census counted about 67,000 people in the municipality of San Ignacio de Velasco, a population that has more than doubled since 1992; the town itself has grown even faster. It is the largest town between the Santa Cruz metropolitan area and the Brazilian border, and the shopping, administrative and transport centre for a large rural region.

Cattle and timber are the backbone of the economy. The municipality's forests yield hardwoods such as mara, cedar and tajibo, ranchers show their best animals at the annual livestock fair, Fexposiv, and the Mennonite colonies farm intensively. Trade with Brazil, crafts and a modest tourist business based on the missions and on Noel Kempff Mercado National Park, far to the north, add to it.

Daily life follows the climate: early starts, a long rest in the heat of the day and evenings in the plaza. Water comes from the Guapomó lagoon and from wells. Dry-season fires, deforestation in the Chiquitano forest, the condition of the roads and the national economic crisis are the main concerns.

San Ignacio eats the food of the Santa Cruz lowlands, built on beef, rice, cassava, plantain and maize, with cattle country ensuring that beef is never far from the table. Majadito, rice cooked with salted, dried meat, and grilled meat at family gatherings are everyday staples, and locro, a broth of rice, meat, plantain and cassava, is a common lunch.

Breakfast is often a hot empanada from the market, and afternoon coffee comes with the cassava-starch and cheese breads of the region, such as cuñapés. The market's eateries serve simple meals all day, and the festival of Velasco traditions in October puts the region's typical dishes on show alongside its crafts.

Sonso, cassava mixed with cheese and grilled on skewers over coals, belongs to the same tradition. Tropical fruit is plentiful in season, among it the achachairú, a golden-orange fruit that grows wild only in the lowlands of Bolivia, and fresh juices and somó, a sweet maize drink, are the usual accompaniments to a meal.