CHURCHES ORIENTATIONS IN THE JESUITS MISSIONS AMONG GUARANI PEOPLE

Abstract

The Jesuit order had an intense missionary activity in America during the colonial period. In particular, from

the sixteenth century until their expulsion in 1767 they carried out an extensive and well-known work

among the Guarani groups, in what became known as the Jesuit Province of Paraguay (now part of Argenti

na, Paraguay and Brazil). The large number of missions founded on this undertaking (30 survived the last

period), were establishments with a well-studied urban plan one of whose axes was that of the church,

which differs from both the urbanism proposed by the "Leyes de Indias" and the most classic ecclesiastical

arrangements. This urban plan is of great importance for South American urbanism since it is an alternative

paradigm to the order proposed by the colonial legal framework and constitutes a particular reinterpretation

of the Baroque, which integrates contributions of the Guarani conceptions. Although Jesuit urbanism in the

region has been studied, it has not been done within the framework of cultural astronomy.

In general, the works of cultural astronomy dedicated to the orientations of churches have divided these

studies by chronological periods, and by geographical areas. We believe that adding focused approaches to

specific religious orders can be very fruitful given the variety of methodologies and intentions. With this

idea we undertook a joint study of the orientations of the Jesuit missions of the Guaraní region. During the

fieldwork the sites of the 30 missionary villages in question were visited in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.

We have measured the twenty-one existing ruins and analyzed the old planes of the nine of which there are

no recognizable material remains.

The work deals with the results of this survey by putting in to dialogue with existing studies on Jesuit urban

ism and with the chronicles and writings of the Jesuits themselves. We seek to establish the relevance of as

tronomical observation for the ordering of these missions and their interaction with other criteria.

One of the first results shows that the orientation axes of the churches of these missions do not follow the

arrangement expected in general in Christian churches, associated to the solar range. We discuss what the

orientations found can tell us about the methods used to bring them to practice and relate these evidences to

the testimonies of the Jesuits themselves.