Colombia (Lonely Planet, 5th Edition) - Jens Porup [8]
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The official site of the US Colombian embassy is www.colombiaemb.org. It has good up-to-date information on the country.
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PRE-COLUMBUS COLOMBIA
Set at the point where South America meets Central America, present-day Colombia saw the continent’s first inhabitants arrive between 12,500 and 70,000 years ago, having migrated from the north. Most – such as the ancestors of the Inca – just passed through. Little is known of the groups who did stick around (eg the Calima, Muisca, Nariño, Quimbaya, Tayrona, Tolima and Tumaco). By the time the Spaniards arrived, the first inhabitants were living in small, scattered communities, subsisting on agriculture or trade. They hardly rivaled the bigger civilizations flourishing in Mexico and Peru.
The area’s biggest pre-Columbian sites (San Agustín, Click here; the Tierradentro, Click here; and Ciudad Perdida, Click here) were already long abandoned when the Spaniards arrived. Ciudad Perdida, the Tayrona jungle city, was built in the 11th century with hundreds of stone terraces linked with stairways.
The Muisca, one ot the country’s larger indigenous groups, occupied present-day Boyacá and Cundinamarca, near Bogotá (itself named from a Muisca word), and numbered 600,000 when the Spanish arrived.
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One of the best books on Colombia’s history is David Bushnell’s The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (1993), which follows colonization, partisan conflicts throughout independence, and the emergence of cocaine politics in the 1980s.
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SPANISH CONQUEST
Colombia is named after Christopher Columbus, even though he never set foot on Colombian soil. Alonso de Ojeda, one of Columbus’ companions on his second voyage, was the first European to set foot here in 1500. He briefly explored the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and was astonished by the wealth of the local indigenous people. Attracted by the presumed riches of the locals, the shores of present-day Colombia became the target of numerous expeditions by the Spaniards. Several short-lived settlements were founded along the coast, but it was not until 1525 that Rodrigo de Bastidas laid the first stones of Santa Marta, which is today the earliest surviving town. In 1533 Pedro de Heredia founded Cartagena; with a better harbor it quickly became the principal center of trade.
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GOLD!
From day one of their arrival, tales of gold overwhelmed the conquistador mind-set. Eventually glimpses of gold artifacts, and stories of much more inland, gave birth to the myth of El Dorado, a mysterious jungle kingdom abundant in gold and, in some versions, surrounded by mountains of gold and emeralds. Long into the colonial period, the struggling Nueva Granada viceroyalty was based on a one-export economy: gold.
Eventually the legend became linked with the Muiscas and their famous Laguna de Guatavita, which has suffered endless efforts to dig up enough wealth to change the world. Not much was ever found, alas.
Read more in John Hemming’s fascinating book, The Search for El Dorado (2001).
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In 1536 an advance toward the interior began independently from three directions: under Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada (from Santa Marta), Sebastián de Belalcázar (aka Benalcázar; from present-day Ecuador) and Nikolaus Federmann (from Venezuela). All three managed to conquer much of the colony and establish a series of towns, before meeting in the Muisca territory in 1539.
Of the three, Quesada got there first, crossing the Valle del Magdalena and Cordillera Oriental in 1537. At the time, the Muiscas were divided into two rival clans – one ruled by the Zipa from