State of Conservation (SOC)

Requests Approved: 0 (from1988-1988)
Total Amount Ap proved: 10,000USD

Tourism Pressure; Lack of capacity in conservation techniques, Lack of management mechanism (including legislation), Lack of presentation and interpretation, Lack of human or financial resources, Lack of institution co-ordination. 

Following an interdisciplinary expert team mission organised in October 2002, UNESCO and the World Monuments Fund proposed a three-year capacity building programme for the ensemble of the Jesuit Missions. As a first key-component of this programme, a one-week training-workshop was held at the Jesuit Mission of Sao Miguel in Brazil in November 2003. The workshop was attended by more than fifty representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay and a great number of experts that had been identified by the participating States Parties. The workshop was funded from the World Heritage Fund, the Netherlands Funds-in-Trust and contribution through the World Monuments Fund.

The workshop was interdisciplinary and addressed the following issues: research and documentation, archaeology, conservation, environment and landscape, public use and management. For each of the issues, the participants exchanged experiences and drafted action plans for implementation. Immediately after the workshop, a special training session took place, for a limited number of participants on the conservation of stone, which is a key-issue at all Jesuit Missions sites.

The second year of the programme will culminate in a training-workshop in Argentina, scheduled to take place in October-November 2004. This training-workshop will build upon the previous experiences and the work undertaken in the course of the year.