Chaima

The Chaima are an Indigenous people of eastern Venezuela, whose villages once spread across later Monagas, Anzoátegui and Sucre, around Maturín and the Cumaná coast. They spoke Chaima, a Cariban tongue of the Itoto Majun group related to Cumanagoto and close to Pemón and Yukpa.

After the Spanish conquest many were gathered into Capuchin missions, notably around Caripe, and by the late eighteenth century nearly all the roughly fifteen thousand Indians in the Capuchin missions of northeastern Venezuela were Chaima; one of their number is said to have led a multi-tribal rising against the Spaniards.

Alexander von Humboldt, visiting around 1800, described their stature and customs. Chaima remained in everyday use in the early nineteenth century, one of the three most spoken Indigenous languages of Cumaná and Barcelona, but then declined without surviving as a community language.