Spanish Conquest And Colonial Society
The first Europeans to visit what is now Colombia were the crew of Alonso de Ojeda, who in 1499 led an expedition to the north coast of South America. It reached Cabo de la Vela, on the Península de La Guajira, but did not tarry, because these visitors were interested in trading for gold and pearls, not in colonization. As a member of Ojeda’s expedition, Amerigo Vespucci was among the first to explore the Colombian coasts. Other early expeditions also came to trade, or to seize indigenous people as slaves for sale in the West Indies.
In 1510 Ojeda, having been named governor of the coast as far as Urabá in the west, returned to establish a settlement, named San Sebastián, on the Golfo de Urabá not far from the present border with Panama. Neither it nor other settlements in that vicinity survived long, although from them explorers struck out toward the Isthmus of Panama and elsewhere.
A first permanent Spanish settlement on the Colombian coast was founded in 1525 at Santa Marta; it was close to the territory of the Taironas and would later serve as a base for conquest of the Muiscas. Before that took place, Pedro de Heredia, on January 14, 1533, had founded the city of Cartagena, farther west along the coast and with a magnificent harbor, thanks to which it became the principal port of the colony as well as a leading Spanish naval base in Caribbean waters.
Bands of Spaniards set out from Cartagena and Santa Marta for the exploration and conquest of both coastal lowlands and the Andean interior. In 1536 Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, a lawyer turned military commander who was comparable to Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, or Francisco Pizarro in Peru, launched the most important of these expeditions. He headed inland up the Magdalena toward the land of the Muiscas, which he reached early in 1537 after losing more than half of his party to shipwreck at the mouth of the Magdalena and to disease, insects, and hunger on the march.
After easily overcoming armed resistance, Jiménez de Quesada and his lieutenants occupied the entire Muisca territory and on August 6, 1538, founded the city of Santafé (present-day Bogotá, known as Santa Fe during the colonial period), as capital of the New Kingdom of Granada, as he called this new possession after his birthplace in Spain.
Jiménez de Quesada shortly found his control challenged by two rival expeditions converging on the same spot from different directions. One was led by Nikolaus Federmann, a German in Spanish service who arrived from western Venezuela, and the other by Sebastián de Belalcázar (or Benalcázar), a former lieutenant of Pizarro coming north from Quito who had founded Popayán and Cali on the way. Instead of fighting among themselves for the spoils of the Muiscas, the three conquistadors referred the matter to authorities in Spain, who, not wanting any one conquistador to become too powerful, placed a fourth party in charge instead. However, Jiménez de Quesada was granted other privileges and was one of those who continued the work of exploration and conquest. By the end of the century, most of the principal cities of today’s Colombia already had been founded.
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