The Ruins of São Miguel Arcanjo, known in Brazil as the Ruínas de São Miguel das Missões, are the remains of a Guaraní-Jesuit mission in the northwest of Rio Grande do Sul. From the air the plan of a whole vanished town is legible in the grass: the great roofless church at the centre, the lines of the plaza and the workshops and dwellings around it, laid out to an ordered design that was advanced for its place and time.
São Miguel was one of the Sete Povos das Missões — the seven mission towns the Jesuits founded east of the Uruguay river when the territory was still Spanish. The reduction was built from 1687, and there a self-governing community of thousands of Guaraní grew prosperous, blending European and Indigenous traditions in a flowering of music, craft and architecture. Its great stone church was raised between 1735 and 1750.