Utopia in the tropical forest

The town of San Miguel was melting under the sun, but inside the church it was fresh, almost unreal. It is like being in a fantastic cave, full of saints, an altar covered with gold leaf, curious paintings over the white walls and, in a small sign, a name: Martin Schmidt, architect and musician, Jesuit, who came to the Bolivian tropical forest nearly 300 years ago with a mission in his mind.
That mission, it has been said many times, was to 'save' the souls of indigenous people, and to show them the 'real' god. In any case Schmidt believed so strongly in what he was doing that he left the place where he was born, Baar, in Switzerland, and engaged in a long and also very dangerous trip. Of course, many Jesuits did the same. But this man made a difference: he built incredible churches, he produced violins, cellos and organs in the middle of the jungle, and
also became a composer and a teacher.
In those times the trip started in the south of Spain, then Buenos Aires, and later Córdoba. It was in Córdoba that Schmidt and maybe some other Jesuits too copied the musical scores that they brought to this region, crossing mountains, cold plateaus and jungles. It is well known that Schmidt also had musical instruments, including an organ that he carried all the way from the city of Potosí.
In this eastern part of Bolivia the Jesuits had around 7 'reductions' or missions. For those who haven't heard the story, they organized the indigeouns people, mainly from the Chiquitano ethnic group, in communities were all worked for the common good. Of course, religion was all over. For the indigenous people it was also a way to defend themselves from slavery by Portuguese or Spanish settlers. The official language was the Chiquitano, not Spanish, and the social and urban model was so efficient, that it lasted centuries.In 1767 the Spanish crown expelled the Jesuits from America, and the experiment ended. But not the consequences. Schmidt wanted to stay and die in the jungle. However, he was forced to go.
But before that, he had been a key figure in the musical development of the region. Schmidt learned how to build violins, organs and other instruments, and in every mission they played music, even baroque music from Europe, and there were also some local composers. Many years later, violins still sounded here. And now, with the recovery of the Jesuit adventure, the baroque music is back.
But that was not all. Schmidt was comissioned with a giant task: build a church in San Rafael. Then, he was the architect, hundreds of workers committed to the task. And then he built 2 other churches, and participated in the design of others.The result is here in the 'Jesuit circuit' in this region of Chiquitos in the jungles of eastern Bolivia. The towns are there and preserve the original design and in the plaza usually stands the huge church, beautiful from outside, amazing
inside. The project to rebuild or restore this buildings since the 1970s was headed, by the way, by another Swiss architect, Hans Roth, a missionary in his own way.
It was Roth who found out about the musical scores in Santiago de Chiquitos and in San Miguel. And magic was still woking because he found there the name of a composer, Domenico Zípoli, an Italian from Prato who had been famous in his own country and who died in Córdoba, but that's another story.
The adventure of Schmidt in the tropical forests, as it has been said, ended late the year of 1767 when the Spanish soldiers arrived to take him and other priests back to Europe. He recalls in one of his letters that the people from the missions wanted to resist and kill the soldiers. Well, it didn't happen. It would have been a good story for a movie, for sure.
(Luis Cordova, thinking about utopias in San Ignacio de Velasco).