Cayubaba

The Cayubaba are an indigenous people of the Bolivian Amazon, native to the historic Mojos plains of the Beni, west of the Mamoré River and north of Santa Ana del Yacuma, where they lived in large villages of farmers, hunters and fishermen using woven basket traps. Their own Cayubaba tongue is a linguistic isolate, with no demonstrated relatives.

The first European in their territory, the Jesuit Agustín Zapata, counted seven villages in 1693, six of them holding some eighteen hundred people each and one more than two thousand.

In 1704 Father Antonio Garriga gathered them into the Exaltación de la Santa Cruz mission, and the foundations of San Carlos, Concepción and Las Peñas merged the once numerous Cayubaba into the settled mission world of eighteenth-century Mojos, alongside the Movima and other Beni peoples.