Juan de Castellanos

Juan de Castellanos (1522–1607) was a Spanish soldier, chronicler and priest of the New Kingdom of Granada. Born in Alanís, he sailed to the Indies in the 1530s and fought across the Caribbean.

In 1555 he pursued an ecclesiastical career at Cartagena and was ordained a priest. From 1562 he was parish priest of Tunja, where he amassed a library and spent four decades in his ministry and writing.

His epic Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias is one of the longest poems in Spanish, a verse history of the conquest and the Muisca. He died at Tunja in 1607.