{ "id": "yerbales-de-las-misiones", "type": "entity", "name": "The mission yerbales - planting Ilex paraguariensis instead of harvesting it wild", "summary": "Yerba mate was gathered wild, in forests weeks from anywhere, by conscripted carriers, and the death toll was notorious enough that the order profiting from the trade wrote it down. The reduction towns of Paraguay answered by planting the tree, with stock carried from the Maracayu hills, in what modern agronomy calls the first domestication of the species. The plantations went wild after the expulsion and the art was not recovered until the twentieth century.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "paraguay", "americas", "botany", "agriculture", "labor", "colonial-institutions", "indigenous-peoples", "spanish-empire", "jesuits" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "montoya-conquista-espiritual-1639" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "milicias-guaranies-de-las-misiones" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "imprenta-de-las-misiones-guaranies" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "gumilla-orinoco-ilustrado-1745" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "guayaco-palo-de-las-indias" } ], "questions": [ "Who first cultivated yerba mate?", "Why did the Jesuit missions of Paraguay plant yerba mate?", "What was the labour cost of the wild yerba harvest?", "What happened to the yerba mate plantations after 1767?", "What is the difference between caamini, caacuys and caaguazu?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The plant is a tree, and the eighteenth-century description is accurate. \"Though called an herb, it is the leaf of a tree of the size of a middling apple-tree. In taste it greatly resembles that of mallows, and in figure, when full grown, that of the orange-tree.\" A modern agronomy paper puts the same fact in the terms that matter for cultivation: Ilex paraguariensis \"is a native tree species in the forests of this region, producing foliage in the shade of consociated tree species by nature\".", "sources": [ "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769", "comolli-yerba-mate-agroforestry-2025" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The trade's centre of gravity was the wild stand, not a farm. \"The chief manufacture of this herb is at la Villa, or the New Villarica, which lies near the mountains of Maracayu, situated to the east of the Paraguay in about twenty-five degrees twenty-five minutes south latitude, this being the district of the whole country, in which the Caa-tree thrives best; but it does not grow on the mountains, but in the marshy bottoms between them.\"", "sources": [ "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "The grades were distinctions of processing rather than of species. Charlevoix reports two names in common use, Caa or Caamini and Caacuys or Yerva de Palos, \"though both are but one and the same leaf\", and cites Nicolas del Techo, \"who spent great part of his life in Paraguay\", for three: the Caacuys is the first bud scarcely opened, the Caamini the full-grown leaf stripped of its ribs before roasting, and the Caaguazu or Palos roasted without any such preparation. The roasted leaf \"is kept in holes made under-ground, and lined with cow-skins\", and the Caacuys \"will not bear transportation\".", "sources": [ "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "It was drunk then as it is now. To prepare it \"they throw into boiling water the leaf pulverized and afterwards reduced into a paste\"; the water is skimmed, \"strained through a cloth, and after being left to settle a little, is sucked up through a pipe. They very seldom put any sugar into it, but only a little lemon juice, or certain very sweet scented pastils.\"", "sources": [ "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "The market was continental, and the mining districts were its strongest pull. The dried leaf was \"sent in great quantities to Tucuman, Peru, and Spain\", and was the more esteemed in Peru \"especially into the mountains, and wherever there is any mining going forward, the Peruvian Spaniards finding it the more necessary, as the use of wine in their country is attended with very bad consequences\". Charlevoix reckons that \"they sometimes send to Peru alone, no less than one hundred thousand arobes\".", "sources": [ "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The order's own historian records the human cost of the wild harvest as the origin of the labour system, and does not soften it. The profits of the trade made fortunes, \"but as luxury, like fire, is always upon the increase\", the Spaniards \"were obliged to have recourse to the Indians who had voluntarily submitted to them, or had been reduced by the superior force of arms; at first they made servants of them, but soon after began to consider them as slaves. And as they had no mercy for these unhappy creatures, many of them perished under a species of drudgery they were not accustomed to, and the bad usage with which their cruel task-masters punished their waste of strength, rather than their want of will.\"", "sources": [ "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The reduction towns did not merely trade in the leaf, they planted it, and Charlevoix states where the planting stock came from: the Indians' trade consists chiefly in wild wax and honey, \"and the herb of Paraguay, of which they have every where made plantations; the sale of it being certain, as no one in this country can do without it. I said, that the first plants of this vegetable were brought from the canton of Maracayu, where the best kind of it grows naturally; but they have degenerated very little in the reductions.\"", "sources": [ "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "Modern agronomy credits the same achievement in stronger terms: the Jesuits, from settlements begun in 1609, \"domesticated the tree, established plantations, and developed the commercially viable product\". A pharmacognosy review dates the professional cultivation and trade to about 1670. The two modern statements are compatible but neither is documented at the level of a date, which is why the confidence here is well below that of the eighteenth-century description of the plantations themselves.", "sources": [ "comolli-yerba-mate-agroforestry-2025", "gawron-gzella-yerba-mate-2021" ], "confidence": 0.75 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "The plant was in use long before either the plantations or the Spaniards: \"the first to use Yerba Mate in its natural habitat was the Guarani Indians.\" What the missions changed was where it grew and who cut it, not what it was or who first drank it.", "sources": [ "gawron-gzella-yerba-mate-2021" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "The mission trade was licensed by the Crown and was already being attacked in Charlevoix's own lifetime. \"This trade is sufficiently explained in the decree of Philip V. which I have already so often cited. Some persons have censured the manner of carrying it on, though every circumstance of it is authorized by the sovereign, who plainly saw how indispensably necessary it was for the preservation of this republick.\" The defence is the historian's own and he is an interested party; the censure he is answering is not described.", "sources": [ "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c11", "text": "Labour inside the reductions was directed labour, on the same page that describes the plantations. \"The work of the women is regulated as well as that of the men. It consists chiefly in spinning. The beginning of every week, every woman receives a certain quantity of wool and cotton, which she must return the Saturday night following, ready for the loom. They are, likewise, now and then, put to certain country labours, which do not surpass their strength and capacity.\" The last clause is the author's judgement, not a measurement.", "sources": [ "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c12", "text": "The demand had already made the province dependent on a single crop. The wealth of both the Spaniards and the mission Indians of Paraguay \"formerly consisted, and in regard to many of them still consist, in the Herb of Paraguay\"; and the boom priced its own people out, the \"extraordinary consumption of it\" having \"considerably enhanced it's value\" until many were too poor to buy any.", "sources": [ "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c13", "text": "The knowledge did not survive the expulsion. After the dissolution of the Society \"the plantations run by the monks were destroyed and became wild\", and \"the difficult art of cultivating this plant was resumed only in the middle of the 20th century\". The review that reports this dates the dissolution to 1775, where the expulsion from the Spanish dominions was 1767 and the suppression of the order 1773, so the sequence is credible and the date in that source is not.", "sources": [ "gawron-gzella-yerba-mate-2021" ], "confidence": 0.7 }, { "id": "c14", "text": "What replaced the mission yerbales in the twentieth century was something the eighteenth century would not have recognised. Modern cultivation \"followed monoculture practices on fertile lands previously cleared of native forests\", planted \"typically employing a rectangular grid with approximately 1,110 plants per hectare\" - a full-sun monoculture of a species that in nature produces its foliage in the shade of other trees, which is the reason current agronomy is arguing its way back towards shaded systems.", "sources": [ "comolli-yerba-mate-agroforestry-2025" ], "confidence": 0.8 } ], "takeaways": [ "The first domestication of Ilex paraguariensis happened in the Paraguay reductions, with seedlings carried from the wild stands of Maracayu and planted in the mission towns.", "The reason to plant it was in part a labour question: the wild harvest killed the people sent to do it, and the order that profited from the trade wrote that down.", "Charlevoix's account of the plantations sits on the same page as his account of the women's weekly quota of wool and cotton, so the mission economy that produced the innovation was a directed one.", "The trade was authorised by a decree of Philip V and was being censured by contemporaries, and the only defence of it recorded here is by an interested party.", "The technique was lost with the missions and not recovered for nearly two centuries, which is the strongest available evidence that it was a real technique and not just an orchard." ], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "secondary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "Most accounts of yerba mate begin with the Guarani and jump to the nineteenth-century Argentine industry, mentioning the Jesuits in a clause. The specific thing they leave out is the agronomy: which stands the planting material came from, that it \"degenerated very little\" once moved, and that the art was lost for nearly two hundred years after the expulsion. Those come here from a 1769 printing read page by page and from two open-access papers, and they are set beside what the same 1769 page says about the women's weekly spinning quota and about the censure the mission trade was already under. The claim is a piece of applied botany with a labour history attached, not a good deed.", "confidence": 0.8, "last_verified": "2026-08-12", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/yerbales-de-las-misiones", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/yerbales-de-las-misiones.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "The mission yerbales - planting Ilex paraguariensis instead of harvesting it wild", "description": "Yerba mate was gathered wild, in forests weeks from anywhere, by conscripted carriers, and the death toll was notorious enough that the order profiting from the trade wrote it down. The reduction towns of Paraguay answered by planting the tree, with stock carried from the Maracayu hills, in what modern agronomy calls the first domestication of the species. The plantations went wild after the expulsion and the art was not recovered until the twentieth century.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/yerbales-de-las-misiones", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-12", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "The History of Paraguay: containing amongst many other new, curious and interesting particulars of that country, a full and authentic account of the establishments formed there by the Jesuits, volume I", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=40sIAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA385" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Yerba Mate - A Long but Current History", "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8622869/" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "A sustainable integrated agroforestry system", "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12598783/" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "The mission yerbales - planting Ilex paraguariensis instead of harvesting it wild" } }