One of the big tourist attractions in Paraguay is a bunch of ruins outside the city of Encarnación, an attraction we missed last time as it was just too hot in summer.
In the 18th century Jesuit missionaries had 30 Guaraní Indian villages along the Paraná River. They were called reducciones or “reductions” in English, a strange word for a simple concept.
The Jesuits rounded up the locals, converted them, educated them, trained them in useful skills and helped them create politically independent self sustaining communities called reductions. They had classrooms:
Behind the classrooms they had communal gardens to grow food for the community. They had housing reserved for women and children who had no men. And there was housing for families with their own additional gardens.
There was of course the religious element to the operation, the church:
The design of the front door incorporates Arabic motifs which were popular in Spain at the time. But Papal authority is ever present:
They had two pulpits in the church which is unusual. The idea was to have two preachers carrying out a dialogue to discuss points of theology to explain Christianity to their Guaraní parishioners. 
There is controversy of course about the reductions. Some say they were prisons, slave holdings forcing Christianity on noble savages. The other lot argue the Jeduits were seeking true autonomy for the Indians in the Paraná delta covering southern Brazil, northern Argentina and Paraguay.
It’s a fact that the Jesuits educated the Guaraní and they armed them to defend themselves against Brazilian slave traders called Bandeirantes. And anyone who has studied antebellum slavery in the US knows there were two things slaves could never be allowed to do: learn to read and write or bear arms. So were they slaves? Certainly they had to become Christians which is no unusual thing when you thing of shelters requiring prayers before feeding the homeless but in the context of the time Jesuits knew they were saving those savages. If the certainty of the time is offensive today cultural relativism is a totally separate debate.
What get out of this place as I walk the ruins is the sense of lost opportunity. This place, the Mission of Jesus de Tavarangüe, was never quite completed. Ten years after they started building here, after several moves to find the right location, in 1759 the Jesuits were expelled from South America.
The trouble developed in Europe where various monarchs got annoyed at the Jesuits who tended to be rebellious and devoted to the pope not their local leaders which was terribly bad form. They persuaded pope Clement to disband them worldwide. 
By the time the next pope reinstated the Jesuit order the 30 Guaraní reductions had collapsed and dispersed despite the Indians joy at being released from the strict rules of Jesuit daily life. So that was that. 
The reductions were independent city states, they unlike the regular Spanish (and Portuguese) colonizers tried to lift the Guaraní Indians and give them the tools to live independently. Instead the end of the Jesuits spelled the end of the experiment that some described as a Utopia.
Nowadays there are three sites on Paraguay, all ruins that attract visitors and offer audio tours you can enjoy through your phone in a multitude of languages.
We were there early-ish Sunday morning ing and shared the ruins with a group of Spaniards. By the time we left, the chaotic little parking lot packed with cars. 
And that was our visit to the Jesuit ruins of Paraguay. 
Up next: new tires I hope. Paraguay sells the cheapest rubber in South America I’m told. Here’s hoping.
