The next morning we had to wake up very early in the morning around 5 am as we had a long day ahead. As Britta could only travel 2,5 weeks with me, we had a short timetable, which meant only one long and full day in the area of Santa Cruz de la Sierra before we would fly out to our next stop.
We really wanted to see some of the nature and animals living in Bolivia so we decided to drive all the way to the jungle with a driver and stop in between at nice places. - 830 kilometers in one day!
The driver picked us up at 6 am and we started driving right away. Britta decided to keep sleeping, so I entertained the driver and talked with him over the next few hours to learn some things about the area and make sure he didn´t fall asleep while driving.
After a few hours, I had to pee. In Germany I am used to that you can just hold on anywhere and find some public toilets.. or just search a spot. - but here the driver told me that they are not allowed to just hold on the streets anymore.
He told me that a few weeks earlier there was a group of tourists traveling by bus and the driver had made such a stop. Later they thought a girl was sleeping but then they discovered that she had died. - They found out that when she went peeing a snake must have bitten her in her ladyparts and they think she didn´t tell anyone out of shame... 1 hour later she was dead.
So we drove to the next village and I could go to the toilet there at the house of his friends before we kept driving to our first official stop.
San José de Chiquitos
After about 4 hours of driving, I was surprised that we stopped in a small village. It didn´t seem very special at first but then our driver told us about it during our small breakfast there.
San José is the central town of the municipality of San José de Chiquitos and the capital of the province of Chiquitos and is located in the center of the province at an altitude of 300 km east of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, to which it is connected by a railway line.
The original Santa Cruz was located about 10 km east of the present city of San José between 1560 and 1592 before it was moved west to its current location in 1592. Around 1750, the Mission San José de Chiquitos was founded on the old site of Santa Cruz. - What a historic place to be!
For me imagining that times are coming with different feelings. On one hand, it must have been so cool and special for the Europeans to discover this whole new continent, new fruits, new nature, new landscapes, and new cultures - everything so virgin and beautiful.
On the other hand, I feel so bad that Europeans came here and destroyed all of these great cultures and landscapes. Intoxicated it, conquered it, and took advantage of it. In many places in Latin America, you can still see the results of that big crime - on all levels: cultural, political, and in the landscape.
But I am drifting away from the topic haha. So after our breakfast, we had some free time to explore the Jesuit reductions of the Chiquitos, which were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1990.
From the outside, it didn´t look too special. There was a small park around the main building with banks to sit down and some trees giving shadow. That was very nice as the climate here was super tropical and it was getting warm.
Coming closer to the building we could see how old and how big it actually was. On several signs we could read about the history of the place.
Apprearently, influenced by 16th-century European philosophers' idea of the ideal city, the Jesuits founded several settlements in the Chiquitos area between 1696 and 1790 for natives who had been proselytized to Christianity, the so-called Jesuit reductions.
The World Heritage includes the following six cities: San Rafael, San Jose de Chiquitos, San Miguel, Santa Ana, San Javier and Concepcion
In them, you find Christian architecture mixed with traditional local building methods to create their own style, which gives a quite interesting look.
These buildings were completely restored by the Swiss architects starting in 1972. It is thanks to this restoration that they became attractive and, in their renewed form, were included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
The center of attention - of the building - of course was the church, where the natives learned everything about the "good believes".
Of course, some of the saints here are made of dark wood or painted black"ish", just like you can see in every country of Latin America. As far as I know, it was a method to make the locals identify with them easily. Just like in many countries, the festive days are Christianized. Even here in Germany, we have festive days that have their origin in Germanic history, but the church took them and made a Christian story out of it... Anyway, it was very interesting to walk around those floors imagining how things may have been hundreds of years ago..
I liked how they had put fresh flowers at the altars for the saints. I had never seen that before anywhere else. - The contact with the nature stayed 😊
After we had checked out the place and cooled off in the shadows we went out again and walked around the village for a little bit before we found our driver and went on with our 830km day trip.
It was a great first stop on an eventful day. I hope you enjoyed it!
Cheers,
Liz