San Ignacio

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Next morning we took a bus to San Ignacio, home to the largest and best maintained of the old Jesuit ruins in Argentina. These were not just religious settlements, but rather complete economic cells, providing accommodation, education, and work to indigenous people and also European settlers. Their success caused their sudden death - the Spanish crown was afraid of their growing influence and so the king banned these missions in the 18th century. We were lucky to come here in the evening when there was hardly anybody in the area, and as the sun was going down. The whole city or what’s left of it was our playground. Climbing the walls, doing pushups on ancient stone floors, standing on our hands in the courtyard; it was a silly evening. We stayed in a small family house with a swimming pool (without water) and a banana tree (with amazing fruits!) We had the best burgers here, with an egg on the top, but besides the few restaurants there was really not much to do in this town, and so we took off the next morning for Salta.

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