Chitarero

The Chitarero were a Chibcha-speaking people of the eastern Andes on the Colombia-Venezuela border, holding the high country from Táchira to the Pamplona basin, where the Chicamocha marked their southern limit. Their men wore a calabash gourd of maize wine, or chicha, at the waist, and the Spanish took their word for the vessel, chitarero, as the name of the whole people.

They farmed the high valleys and traded with the Muisca and other neighbours. On 27 May 1533 they ambushed the retreating forces of the German conquistador Ambrosius Ehinger, governor of the Welser colony Little Venice; a poisoned arrow struck his neck; he died four days later near Chinácota, one of their settlements.

When Pamplona was refounded in 1549 the region was still said to hold some 200,000 of them, though no separate Chitarero identity survived colonial times.