Great Church of the Jesuit Mission of La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná

Trinidad was founded in June 1706 and was among the last of the Guaraní reductions built on the Paraná, and the most ambitious: a complex of roughly eight hectares laid out around a main square, with a population of three thousand by 1728. Spanish Wikipedia names the Milanese Jesuit Juan Bautista Prímoli as the architect of the great church and of the plan of the whole settlement; the large stone church was begun around 1745. It is the biggest temple of any of the missions. Its surviving pieces are extraordinary: a stone pulpit assembled from more than a thousand carved parts, two heavily worked sacristy doorways of mixed Portuguese and Spanish influence, and a frieze of angels playing clavichord, pipe organ, trumpets, flute and Paraguayan harp — until scores were found at Moxos, the only visual evidence of how sophisticated mission music had become. The Jesuit expulsion of 1768 emptied the town and the buildings were left to decay.