After the first years of conquest of South America, Spain and Portugal generated the project missionary, involving to the religious orders in the task of carrying out the integrating development of the indigenous communities.
In century XVI, conflicts between the Colonizing lusitanos and the missions Jesuits installed between the rivers Parana and Uruguay arose.
Often violent, these confrontations determined the transfer from the missions to the region of Tape, in the left margin of the Uruguay river, in the present state of Rio Grande do Sul, where they were based during the following years, at the end of century XVII.
The “theocratic State of the Jesuits”, formed by thirty towns, by concession of the Spanish kingdom, was in force according to its own rules of justice, administration and relations with the neighboring nations. The enclaves, today seven of them located in Brazil, eight in Paraguay and fifteen in Argentina, arranged, by that one time, of an independent system of territorial organization and rigid disciplinary norms to their linear city-planning planes.
The architecture works reached their time sea bream from 1735 to 1750, when Spain and Portugal defined the new territorial limits of their colonies in the Treaty of Madrid. As of that moment, the project missionary entered declivity.
The rectangular central place of the Mission lodged to the church, the school of the priests and its dependancies, in a side, and the opposed side, the houses of the indigenous families. The houses prepared in line, had ample rows of balconies.
The structures of the constructions were compound mainly of stone and wood, that have not resisted to the wearing downs of the time and fires. Great part of the architectonic patrimony missionary was lost, being, today, inestimable archaeological places, constituted by massive foundations and of stone stoneware, as well as riquísimo heap of objects and utensils.
Patrimony of the Humanity, on the decision of UNESCO, the ruins of the main church of São Miguel is the main Brazilian symbol of the misionera civilization. This monument, builds of the architect and brother João Jesuit Primoli Batiste, constitutes an expression of the misionera architecture barroca inspired by the Renaissance canons established by Vignola for the church of Gesú, in Rome.
It is the greater set of religious architecture of the jesuíticos redoubts, constituted still today, by rest of walls, mud walls, arches, facade and bell tower. Inestimable world-wide patrimony, has been preserved and recovered by the Ministry of Culture. Next to the place the Museum of the Missions is placed, builds plastic of the architect Lucio Coast, conceived from the houses of the Indian missionaries, and in whom architecture and art objects are exposed.