Two Jesuit Missions in the Llanos de Mojos, Bolivia

Their Short-lived Listory Reconstructed from Written Sources and Lidar Images

Abstract

Our knowledge of the missions established by the Jesuits in the Llanos de Mojos in the late 17th and early 18th centuries has so far been based exclusively on written sources of the time. This article presents lidar plans of two of these missions. The amazing detail of the plans provides us hardly imagined insights into the structure of these missions. For both missions, a brief outline of their history is given first, as without this background it is impossible to determine which “version” of the respective mission the Lidar maps show. Here we can anticipate that one of the lidar maps shows the second foundation of the Mission Santísima Trinidad, which existed between 1711 and 1769, and the other very probably depicts the Mission San Martín, founded in the Iténez area around 1708, which was only moved to another location shortly before the Jesuits were expelled from the Americas in 1767.