Not a song title today but a film. 'The Mission', starring Robert de Niro and Jeremy Irons it tells the story of the Jesuit missions established in Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina in the 17th and 18th centuries to convert the local Guarani community to Christianity.

However this is not the usual tale of Christian missionaries seeking to Europeanise, and in the process effectively exterminate, a local indigenous people. Rather the Jesuits, whilst setting out to convert the Guarani, also sought to protect them from the colonial labour system of 'encomieda', a condition of virtual slavery. The Jesuits built settlements, missions, to accommodate the Guarani and encourage them to adopt a more sedentary way of life, in reducciones, attached to the missions. However they were allowed to retain many of their indigenous traditions which were merged with Christianity to form an amalgam of different religous symbolism.

This melding was also reflected in the architecture of the mission complexes which mix different styles - Baroque, Romanesque and Guarani - in a unique process of acculturation, particularly noticeable in the figurative stonework.

The missions had a considerable degree of autonomy within the Spanish empire and became virtually self-sufficient without having to rely on forced labour. This distinctive process of urbanisation did not go down well with the ruling Spanish and Portuguese colonists who tried to destroy them by force. This forced the Jesuits to move the missions to safer territory and then form an Indian militia to defend them. It was probably this latter act which eventually led to the Spanish monarchy expelling the Jesuits from the Americas in 1767.

Today several of the missions remains have been declared as UNESCO World Heritage sites. The most famous is the one we visited today 'La Santisma Trinidad de Parana'. In truth there is not a great deal to see but it's not often you get a World Heritage site pretty much to yourselves as we did today. They represent an interesting episode in the, otherwise, brutal history of western colonialism in South America.