San Ignacio

We arrived in the red dirt streets of San Ignacio on Tuesday, a short 4 1/2-hour bus ride from Iguazu. I have loved to look out at the small towns we've driven through on our giant comfortable buses (so far South America does buses really well) and it felt wonderful to get out and stay in one. Our bus was met by a local guy named Michael who sold us on his new hostel a couple of blocks away. It was a nice place, opened 3 months before by an extensive network of relatives, including many sisters who seemed to do a lot of the work including making really delicious meals.


We walked out to the ruins of the Jesuit reduccion in San Ignacio, built in the 17 & 18th centuries and not rediscovered for restoration until the 1940s. The iron-rich earth here is red and the mission was built with blocks of soft and beautiful red sandstone. The ruins are in a big park which contains the remains of all the residential buildings lived in by the Jesuits and their convertees, the Guaraní. The ruins are just walls without decoration, except for the remains of the church where carved pilasters and reliefs surround the main door. All around the main plaza and down the fronts of the old residences are the remains of square pillars that used to support an awning. At night every pillar around the plaza is spotlit with its own light and the carvings are illuminated with soft and changing colored lights. Vaguely folkloric music plays from the trees. It is a beautifully ethereal experience.



On Wednesday we walked out to the woodland home of the Argentinian poet and writer Horacio Quiroga. A museum there houses family photos and rusted tools and tells the story of Quiroga's life, fraught with tragedy. His father accidentally killed himself while cleaning a gun and, startled by the shot Quiroga's mother dropped baby Horacio on the floor. His stepfather killed himself after suffering a debilitating stroke. His brother and sister died of typhus. His first wife committed suicide after becoming depressed living in the forest where Quiroga had moved the family to live on the Río Paraná away from the hustle of Buenos Aires. Quiroga committed suicide when dying of prostate cancer and having been, as a plaque informed us, left alone and dying in the forest by his second wife and his daughter.


We gleaned all this from informational plaques along a path through a bamboo grove. The walk did not yield only tragedy. According to the English translation, Quiroga was not only a writer. "He was manufacturer of sweet of peanut, broken corn and mosaics of bleck and hoarder of ferruginous sand. He was an inventor of an exotic device to kill ants..."

On Thursday we took the hostel up on a tour of a local provincial park. It was a beautiful hike and lovely day. We had one other hosteller, Bas from Holland, and our guide Beatrice. Also Nelson, the driver of the immense open topped truck that took us into the park. The park is on the banks of the Río Paraná which runs between Argentina and Paraguay. It is full of medicinal plants and beautiful trees. It also apparently housed Herr Borman, Hitler's secretary, who fled to Argentina after the war. There is a ruined building deep in the forest, possibly an old Jesuit outpost, called Casa Borman where he is thought to have holed up for 10 years. According to our guide Borman escaped to Paraguay when he was close to being captured and has not been heard from since.