Explore Santa Cruz: the Jesuit Missions & Amboró

Santa Cruz de la Sierra is Bolivia's largest and fastest-growing city, laid out in concentric ring roads (anillos) rather than a colonial grid, with a tropical climate and lowland cattle-ranching economy that give it a genuinely different feel from the highland cities. Its own Carnival, celebrated the same season as Oruro's, runs to a completely different register — a street-party parade rather than religious pageantry — and its cuisine leans on lowland staples like yuca and plantain rather than the Andean potato and quinoa found further west. The city functions as the practical gateway to both the Jesuit Missions and Amboró National Park.

Six surviving mission towns — built by Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries among the Chiquitano people — form one of Bolivia's most distinctive UNESCO sites. Their wooden Baroque-mestizo churches, blending European design with local craftsmanship and materials, survived largely intact specifically because of the region's remoteness, unlike most Jesuit missions elsewhere in South America, which were destroyed or fell into ruin after the Jesuit order's expulsion in 1767. The missions' own archives preserved baroque musical manuscripts brought by the missionaries and adapted locally, still performed today at a biennial international festival held across the mission towns — a genuinely living tradition rather than a museum piece.

Amboró sits at a genuine ecological crossroads southwest of Santa Cruz city, where the Andes, the Amazon basin and the drier Chaco region converge — a convergence that produces an unusually dense concentration of plant and animal species found nowhere else in Bolivia, cataloguing hundreds of bird species alone within a relatively compact protected area. The park's landscape shifts from cloud forest to dry tropical forest within a short distance, a fundamentally different character from the altiplano and salt-flat scenery that defines most of Bolivia's tourism, and from the Amazon lowlands accessed via La Paz and Rurrenabaque further north.