Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The rubber boom
With the advent of the
rubber boom
the town's population fell dramatically as thousands
were forcibly recruited to work as rubber collectors in the forests to the north, while many
others fled rather than face the same fate. In 1887, at the height of the rubber boom, the Mo-
jeños launched their last uprising, a non-violent religious movement led by a messianic chief
called Andrés Guayocho, who was said to be a great sorcerer and excellent ventriloquist. But
the rebellion was swiftly and brutally put down by the Bolivian authorities, many of the sur-
vivors fled, and the town was left in the hands of non-indigenous merchants and landowners.
The modern era
The region's
cattle economy
really developed in the second half of the twentieth century,
when enterprising ranchers began cross-breeding the semi-wild cattle descended from the
herds brought in by the Jesuits with sleek Xebu cattle brought in from Brazil. Until the road
downfromSantaCruzwasbuiltinthe1970s,Trinidadwaseffectively cutofffromtherestof
Bolivia, and it remains an isolated and somewhat inward-looking place, voluble in its right-
wing opposition to the La Paz administration (the walls are plastered with anti-Evo Mor-
ales graffiti) and fiercely defensive of its
camba
(lowland) identity. The ranchers - known as
ganaderos
- see themselves as rugged, self-reliant pioneers who have tamed a wild region
and created prosperity with almost no help from central government.
Plaza Ballivián
Though most of its buildings are modern, Trinidad maintains the classic layout of a Spanish
colonial town, its streets set out in a neat grid pattern around a shady, well-maintained central
square, the
Plaza Ballivián
, which the locals proudly insist is the biggest in Bolivia. On the
southsideoftheplaza,the
Catedral
isanunexceptionalmodernstructurebuiltbetween1916
and 1931 on the site of the earlier Jesuit church. The buildings around the plaza, meanwhile,
are all built with eaves overhanging the raised pavements.
Museo Etno-Arqueológico del Beni “Kenneth Lee”
Universidad Autónoma del Beni, Av Ganadera • Mon-Fri 8am-noon, 2-6pm, Sat & Sun by appointment • Bs10
• 03 4624519
North along Avenida Cipriano Barace, some 1.5km from the centre of town, the beautiful
grounds of the
Museo Etno-Arqueológico
are a fitting tribute to the research that suggests
a mighty and
sophisticated civilization
existed in the Amazon basin between 3000 and 1000
BC. The museum is dedicated to Kenneth Lee, a Texan engineer who was impassioned by
the Moxos peoples and their apparently highly advanced hydro-agricultural systems of raised
fields and earth mounds. Housed in a yellow, circular building, two rooms of ceramics, pho-
tos and storyboards outline the basic facts and findings, along with musical instruments and
striking wooden masks: elegant, stylized human faces rather than the supernatural extravag-
ances favoured in the highlands.
