Bolivia Guide
Santa Cruz and the Eastern Lowlands
Chiquitos
East of Santa Cruz stretches a vast, sparsely populated plain broken by occasional low rocky ridges and covered in scrub and fast-disappearing 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 lived in houses with low doorways – chiquito means small), in the eighteenth century this region was the scene of one of the most extraordinary episodes in Spanish colonial history, as a handful of Jesuit priests established a series of flourishing mission towns where the previously hostile indigenous inhabitants of the region, known as Chiquitanos, converted to Catholicism and settled in their thousands, adopting European agricultural techniques and building some of the most magnificent colonial churches in South America. This theocratic socialist utopia ended in 1767, when the Spanish crown expelled the Jesuit order from the Americas, allowing their indigenous charges to be exploited by settlers from Santa Cruz, who seized the Chiquitanos's lands and took many of them into forced servitude; the region has been in a state of economic decline ever since. Six of the ten Jesuit mission churches still survive, however, and have now been restored to their original magnificence and recognized as UNESCO World Heritage Sites – their incongruous splendour in the midst of the wilderness is one of the most remarkable sights in Bolivia.