Cueva

The Cueva were the principal Indigenous people of the eastern Panamanian isthmus when Europeans arrived, holding Darién and both coasts from the Atrato to Chame. Rival chiefdoms included Pocorosa, Comagre and Careta on the Caribbean and Chochama on the Pacific.

Cueva was the Spanish name for their speech, now often treated as a lingua franca shared by several groups; its links to the Chibchan, Choco and Arawak families remain debated.

After 1510 settlers including Vasco Nunez de Balboa reached them from Santa Maria la Antigua; at Comagre he heard of a southern sea and reached the Pacific in 1513. War, epidemics, slaving and forced labour broke them within a generation: by the 1530s they had ceased to exist as a people, fugitives taking to the mountains or joining their enemies the Guna, who filled the empty lands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.