In the south-east of Paraguay, near the Parana river and the Argentine border, a field of red earth, tall trees and golden sandstone walls marks the site of La Santisima Trinidad de Parana, one of the largest of the Jesuit missions built among the Guarani people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The ruins are about nine kilometres from Hohenau, a small town of just over five thousand people, and not far from Trinidad village and Jesus, where another mission stands.
The Jesuits founded the mission in 1706, and for around sixty years it was a thriving community, with several thousand Guarani living around a vast central plaza, with a church, workshops, a school and a cemetery. The Guarani were skilled musicians, builders, sculptors and farmers, and the sandstone church, with its carved pulpit, columns and baroque angels playing harps and violins, shows the quality of their work. The missions governed themselves under the Jesuits, grew yerba mate and cotton, and kept armies to defend against slave raiders from Brazil. In 1767, the Spanish crown expelled the Jesuits, and the missions declined, as the Guarani scattered and the buildings were left to the forest. UNESCO inscribed Trinidad, together with the nearby Jesus de Tavarangue, in 1993. Santa Maria la Mayor and Nuestra Senora de Loreto, on your ride, are sister missions on the Argentine side.
The ride from Encarnacion, the nearest city, follows Ruta 6 through gentle hills, with red soil, fields of soybeans and wheat, yerba mate plantations and small villages of German and Slavic settlers, descended from immigrants of the early twentieth century. Hohenau is one of these colonies, and the countryside has an oddly European feel, with tidy farms and wooden houses. The roads are generally paved and quiet, and stray cattle and dogs can wander across, particularly at night. Summers from November to March are hot, humid and stormy, and winters are mild and dry, so the best months are April to October.
Fuel is available at Hohenau and Encarnacion, and the towns have simple restaurants serving grilled meat, chipa, a cheese bread, and sopa paraguaya, a thick cornbread. Drink terere, the cold mate infusion sipped from a shared cup, and bring a hat and water for the ruins, since there is little shade.