Colombia Exploration and Conquest
Stone divinities in San Agustín, Huila Department
Courtesy Embassy of Colombia, Washington
The group of Spaniards that first came to the New World
consisted of conquistadors, administrators, and Roman
Catholic
clergy. The adventurous conquistadors were risk-taking
entrepreneurs, financing their own expeditions in the
expectation
of being able to get rich quick. The administrators were
appointed
by and represented the crown in the colonies and sought to
maintain
the New World colonies as a source of wealth and prestige
for the
Spanish Empire. The clergy sought to save the souls of the
native
Indians, and in the process they acquired land and wealth
for the
church. The conquistadors, who felt they owed nothing to
the crown,
often came into conflict with the latter's attempts to
centralize
and strengthen its authority over the colonies.
In what became present-day Colombia, the conquistadors
explored
and began to settle the coastal areas. The first explorers
to round
the coast of the Guajira Peninsula and enter Colombian
territory
were Alonso de Ojeda in 1499 and Rodrigo de Bastidas in
1500. In
1510 Ojeda founded Santa María la Antigua de Darién
(present-day
Acandí) on the western side of the Golfo de Urabá.
Bastidas
established Santa Marta in 1525
(see
fig. 1). In 1533
another
explorer, Pedro de Heredia, organized Cartagena after
pacifying the
Indians in the area. These coastal cities served as havens
from
Indian attacks and as bases for exploratory expeditions
into the
interior. In addition, Cartagena linked the colonies with
the
motherland and became a focal point of intercontinental
travel.
Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, Nikolaus Federmann, and
Sebastián
de Belalcázar figured prominently in the exploration of
the
interior. In 1536 Jiménez de Quesada set out in search of
a path to
Peru. During the course of his journey, he encountered the
Muisca
in the Sabana de Bogotá and in 1538 founded the city of
Santa Fe de
Bogotá (present-day Bogotá)--the eventual power center for
the
colony of New Granada. Federmann explored the eastern
plains,
crossed the Cordillera Oriental, and arrived at Bogotá in
1539.
Traveling northward from Peru, Belalcázar established the
cities of
Popayán and Santiago de Cali (present-day Cali). Other
members of
his group traveled northward and founded Cartago and
Anserma. In
1539 Belalcázar arrived in Bogotá, where the three
conquistadors
negotiated the division of the newly explored territory.
The expeditions that these men led provided the basis
for the
settlement of the highlands interior that played a
significant role
in the future life of the colony. To an even greater
extent than in
Peru and New Spain (present-day Mexico), many of the
population
centers established during the conquest were located in
remote
intermontane valleys and plateaus. This contributed to New
Granada's becoming one of the most isolated of all the
colonies of
the Spanish Empire in the New World.
Data as of December 1988
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