Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
School
No phone. For travellers after seriously low-cost digs, La Higuera's school provides
verybasic,dorm-likeaccom
mod
ation inbuildingssurroundingtheplayground.Therearetoi-
lets but no showers. Dorms
Bs10
Chiquitos: the Jesuit missions
East of Santa Cruz stretches a vast, sparsely-populated plain covered in scrub and fast-disap-
pearing dry tropical forest, which gradually gives way to swamp as it approaches the border
with Brazil. Named
Chiquitos
by the Spanish (apparently because the original indigenous
inhabitants livedinhouseswithlowdoorways-
chiquito
meanssmall), intheeighteenth cen-
tury this region was the scene of one of the most extraordinary episodes in Spanish colonial
history, as a handful of Jesuit priests established flourishing
mission towns
where the re-
gion's previously hostile indigenous inhabitants converted to Catholicism and settled in their
thousands, adopting European agricultural techniques and building some of South America's
most magnificent colonial churches. This theocratic socialist utopia ended in 1767, when
the Spanish crown expelled the
Jesuits
, allowing their indigenous charges to be exploited
by settlers from Santa Cruz, who seized the Chiquitanos' lands and took many of them into
forced servitude. Six of the ten Jesuit
mission churches
still survive, however, and have been
restored and declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites - their incongruous splendour in the
midst of the wilderness is one of Bolivia's most remarkable sights.