BOLAÑOS, LUIS. - One of the most illustrious Franciscan missionaries of South America. Born at Marchena (Spain) in 1539; died at Buenos Aires on 11 October 1629. Having become a Franciscan, he left for America in 1572, where he laboured for fifty years for the conversion of the indigenous peoples of the de la Plata region. Driven from his first field of apostolate, in the region of the Picer and Bauay rivers, because he defended the Indians against the colonizers, he went to Paraguay, working especially in the province of Guayará, where from 1580 he began to gather the converts into separate villages, thus founding the first Reductions, several of which he handed over to the Jesuits when his confrere Alfonso di s. Bonaventura had transferred to Chile.
At the age of eighty he retired to a convent in Buenos Aires. It is estimated that he baptized 30,000 neophytes. He also wrote grammars and pamphlets of religious instruction in local languages, and composed the first catechism in the Guaraní language of Paraguay, which in 1724 was reprinted by the Fathers of the Society of Jesus.