The Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos are the single most rewarding excursion from Santa Cruz, and one of the great cultural circuits of South America. In the late 17th century, Jesuit missionaries founded a chain of self-governing Indigenous towns on the remote Chiquitos plains east of Santa Cruz — each built around a vast wooden church with painted walls and baroque organs. When the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish empire in 1767, the towns were expected to collapse. Instead the Chiquitano kept the buildings, the music, and the liturgy intact for two centuries, until Swiss architect Hans Roth led a decades-long restoration beginning in the 1970s. Six of the surviving churches — San Javier, Concepción, San Ignacio, Santa Ana, San Miguel, and San Rafael — were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1990.
The churches themselves are unlike anything else in South America. The architecture combines baroque European planning with Indigenous Chiquitano craftsmanship: turned wooden columns wrapped in carved spirals, painted polychrome facades, and elaborate altars assembled without nails. Concepción and San Javier are the two most visited, both accessible in a day from Santa Cruz if you push; the full circuit through all six churches takes four or five days by hired car or organised tour. The towns between the missions are quiet and unhurried — a world apart from Santa Cruz's ring roads and commerce.
The circuit comes alive during the biennial Festivales de Música Renacentista y Barroca, held in the mission churches every two years in April and May. Orchestras and choirs perform 18th-century music composed specifically for these spaces, in acoustics that the musicians still find remarkable. If your timing allows it, the festival transforms an already exceptional trip into something genuinely rare.