Roaming South America

UNESCO Heritage Sites - Part 2 - And the Mennonites

June 13, 2026

My previous blog was about some of the towns (pueblos) east of Santa Cruz, Bolivia. After going out to Roboré and Santiago de Chiquitos, I returned to the town of San José de Chiquitos. San José is the turn-off point to do the northern circuit of the Jesuit Missions. The first stop is San Rafael.

Santiago de Chiquitos

Santiago de Chiquitos, population around 2000, is obviously very small. And it has no business district, and almost no businesses. There are two working tiendas (convenience stores), 3 or 4 restaurants (no menus in any, you get what they're serving for that day), and nothing else. Oh, there's a hotel and a few other alojamientos (like a hotel but cheaper). It's very quiet, partly because of the small population and also because the only paved roads are the one that comes to the town and the four that go around the plaza. All the rest is sand and a mess. But there is a historic Jesuit Mission church here, which is why I visited this town. Photos in the photo album.

Eastern Bolivia is a strange and fascinating place. The further east I traveled from Santa Cruz, the smaller and quieter the towns became. The roads narrowed, the traffic faded away, and the noise of the city slowly disappeared behind me. What remained were villages where people still greet strangers in passing, where the loudest sounds are birds in the trees and dogs barking somewhere down the road, and where centuries-old Jesuit churches still stand at the center of daily life. These are not places for people seeking nightlife, shopping malls, or convenience. They are places for slowing down, breathing deeply, and remembering what silence sounds like. But, as peaceful as these towns are, they also remind you how much modern life depends on little things like banks, pharmacies, supermarkets, and even a simple cash machine. I enjoyed my time in this region very much, especially Santiago de Chiquitos, but for me, these are places to visit, admire, and experience for a while before returning to somewhere with at least a few more services. So I turned north.

San Rafael de Velasco

San Rafael is small, with a population of a bit more than 2000. But, unlike Santiago, this town has businesses - hotels, restaurants, hardware stores, pharmacies, tiendas with good fruit and vegetables. Why the difference? San Rafael sits on a highway; Santiago is well off the beaten path. So, San Rafael doesn't have the same level of tranquility as Santiago. The highway carries a lot of heavy truck traffic, and a lot of trucks stop here for the night. The town is in the process of "paving" quite a few of its roads. They're laying concrete pavers, like thick tiles, 6-sided ones. The roads are looking good. Oh, and here in San Rafael is one bank and the all-important cash machine. Of the restaurants, one is a "sit-down" restaurant with inside tables, and the others have their tables outside. Not a big deal when the weather is warm, but today and yesterday? Not warm. Very wet yesterday. Cold today. But again, none of the restaurants have menus - you get what they have available for the day.

San Rafael has one of the UNESCO Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos. It dates back to 1695. The original church is long gone, having been relocated twice due to epidemics, once after a fire, and then some years later, it went through another rebuilding in 1750. The current church is a restored version of the last rebuilt church.

San Miguel de Velasco

San Miguel has a population of about 4500. This town has another of the UNESCO Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos. This one was built in 1721. This church was restored in the early 1980s. This town has noticeably more businesses than the previous several towns I visited. With each town, as they have grown a bit larger in population, they have also decreased in the number of people greeting me in the streets. This is expected, though.

San Miguel has few options for overnighting - one hotel, and I could be wrong, but nothing else that I've seen in walking around town. Across the street from this one hotel is a restaurant owned by an Argentino and it's surprisingly nice for a town this size. Very pleasant atmosphere (soft jazz playing), good food, and a very nice host. He said they sometimes have live music. And they're open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which is also quite rare in these little towns.

The Mennonites

In the departments of Santa Cruz Department and parts of Beni Department, in central Bolivia, there are dozens of Mennonite colonies, many within striking distance of San José de Chiquitos, Roboré, and all these other towns I've been visiting.

They’re mostly descendants of German-speaking Mennonites who migrated over generations from Russia, Canada, Mexico, and Paraguay. They were chasing one thing: isolation, so they could live by their own rules.

When I was at the terminal in San José de Chiquitos, a trufi AKA collectivo (a shared taxi-van) pulled in and a group or family of Mennonites got out. The women wore solid blue dresses, mid-calf length, and white, wide-brimmed, round hats. The men wore overalls, plaid shirts, and hats or caps. They transferred to another trufi, the one I was also riding in, and went to Roboré (Where I was heading). Some colonies are ultra-conservative and avoid modern tech completely. Others are more flexible and will use public transport when needed. Bolivia has a mix of both, so what I saw was probably a group that’s traditional but not fully cut off.

Bolivia has been a bit of a magnet for Mennonite settlements because:
-The government historically offered cheap land
-There’s less pressure to modernize
-They can maintain language (often Plautdietsch, a Low German dialect) and customs.
They’ve become major agricultural producers, especially soybeans and dairy. Some of the most efficient farms in the region are Mennonite-run.

What was interesting was that one guy, probably 18-20 years old, was staring at me like I was from Mars, and I was probably staring at him with the same kind of look. If he were from a more conservative colony, his exposure to outsiders might be pretty limited. I wasn't just “a foreigner” to him; I was evidence of an entirely different way of life. In the same way, he hit me like a time capsule.

>And there’s another layer. At 18–20, that’s the age where curiosity starts poking holes in the walls a bit. Some Mennonite communities even have a phase where young people get a taste of the outside world before deciding whether to stay or leave. Bolivia’s versions of that are usually more restrained than, say, in North America, but the curiosity is still human nature.

So his stare? That wasn’t hostility. That was:
“You’re not supposed to exist in my story… but here you are.”
And you were doing the same thing back:
“I’ve seen a lot in South America… but you weren’t on today’s itinerary.”
And then there was the older man in the group. He greeted me with his eyes only, barely a noticeable nod. I said, "Buenas," and got no verbal response. I watched them for a while between the two vans, and they hardly said a word, even to each other. And none of that was somebody being rude. It's just that they don't waste words. Even among themselves, communication is minimal, purpose-driven, and they're quiet by default. That tiny nod was that man's way of greeting me.

So, why do they not talk as much as everyone else? It's just their culture. If there’s nothing that needs to be said, nothing gets said. No filler, no “nice weather today,” no social padding. Their first language is either Plautdietsch or German; some might know some Spanish. So, they simply don't partake in conversations that might be a struggle. And some of these communities intentionally keep a boundary with the outside world. They're not hostile, just distant. Engaging casually with strangers isn’t really part of the script. In public, especially around outsiders, they tend to be even more reserved. Inside their own community, they’re not robots. There’s conversation, humor, and family life. You just don’t get to see that side at a traffic stop.

In all the time that I watched them, they barely talked to each other. What looks like silence might be:
-People who already know the plan
-No need to coordinate out loud
-Comfort with quiet that would make most of us itch.
Meanwhile, most of us would be filling that space with:
-“You got the bags?”
-“Is this the right van?”
-“Did we pay already?”
They skip all that. So, when that man gave me barely a nod, it meant: “Seen. Noted. Moving on.”

In the trufi on the drive from San José to Roboré, the driver asked if the upcoming road was where anyone wanted out. There was not a single word spoken in response. The driver mumbled in Spanish (I was sitting in the front passenger seat) - "I guess that means no." I held back a laugh and just nodded with him. The two worlds briefly sharing a trufi and finding no common language - literally.

To Summarize

As I moved eastward from Santa Cruz, each town was an improvement over the previous towns. Santiago was the most pleasant but also the one with almost no businesses. It's just a village, but the peacefulness was unbeatable. The next leg of this part of my journey turns northward and then makes a loop west and south to return to Santa Cruz. But along the way, I'll be visiting several more towns with UNESCO Jesuit missions. As for Bolivia, in general, I'm not enamored by the food. Outside of the big cities, the restaurants don't have menus. Instead, the server tells you the two or three dishes they have for that day. And, there's very little in the way of variety. All the restaurants serve basically the same thing. I'm getting tired of having the same food every day. Also, I'm finding that the Bolivian Spanish is harder to understand than the Spanish of all the other countries I've visited. I must admit, I'm looking forward to leaving Bolivia and going to Argentina. But that's at least a month away, still.