Ichapekene Piesta San Ignacio de Moxos

San Ignacio de Moxos honors its patron, San Ignacio de Loyola, with Ichapekene Piesta, a UNESCO-listed festival built around the machetero dance, in which men in tall feather headdresses move in disciplined lines to mission-era music descended from Jesuit teaching. Comic torito performers, saints' processions and indigenous cabildo authorities round out several days of observance centered on 31 July, in the tropical Beni lowlands far from Bolivia's Andean festival circuit.

Ichapekene Piesta grew out of the Jesuit mission settlements the Society of Jesus established across the Moxos plains in the 17th and 18th centuries, and it remains the clearest surviving expression of how Moxeño indigenous communities absorbed, reshaped and outlasted that colonial religious project.