Marcos Terceros

— Biography

Marcos is a third-generation guide from San Ignacio de Velasco, one of the six Chiquitanía mission towns. His grandfather participated in the UNESCO restoration of San Ignacio in the 1970s — physically scaffolding the carved wooden facades that are now among the most photographed baroque structures in South America. His father led cultural tours through the Chiquitano dry forest for twenty years. Marcos grew up between mission churches and forest trails, and knows every carved detail of every retablo in the circuit.

The six Jesuit mission churches of the Chiquitanía — San Javier, Concepción, Santa Ana, San Miguel, San Rafael, and San Ignacio de Velasco — were built between 1691 and 1767 by Jesuit missionaries and Chiquitano craftsmen working together. What makes them architecturally unique is the synthesis: European baroque structural forms fused with Chiquitano tropical motifs — jaguars, macaws, and ceibo flowers carved into the facades alongside Christian saints. Marcos reads the iconography of each church as a document of the cultural negotiation that took place during the mission period, a history that has no equivalent anywhere else in the Americas.

The baroque music tradition the Jesuits established in the Chiquitanía is still alive. Choirs and orchestras using locally made instruments — violins, harps, and wind instruments built from Chiquitano wood — still rehearse and perform in the mission churches. Marcos coordinates access to rehearsals and informal concerts that are not on any public schedule, experiences available only through community relationships built over a lifetime.

Marcos also guides the Bolivian Pantanal routes, navigating the San Matías wetlands and the Puerto Suárez and Puerto Quijarro waterways on the Brazilian border. He holds a Bolivian river navigation licence — the only LOVEBOLIVIA guide with this qualification — and reads the Pantanal seasonal flooding patterns to identify where giant river otters, yacaré caimans, and jabiru storks concentrate in each month of the year.

In the Chiquitano dry forest surrounding the missions, Marcos identifies giant anteater burrows, reads peccary trails, and knows the endemic bird species — the Chiquitano screech owl, the black-bodied woodpecker — that are found only in this forest type and nowhere else in Bolivia.