E'ñepás

The E'ñepá, better known as the Panare, are a Cariban-speaking people of the Guayana Highlands in southern Venezuela, whose homeland is the Cuchivero basin of western Bolívar State, south of the Orinoco. Panare belongs to the northern branch of the Cariban family.

When Europeans sighted the Orinoco delta in 1498, the E'ñepá already lived in these forested highlands, and for more than three centuries they remained beyond the effective reach of missionaries and colonists, their way of life almost untouched.

They lived in villages of one or several longhouses housing twenty to eighty people, combining manioc swidden gardens with hunting tapir and deer, fishing with the barbasco poison plant, and gathering palm fruit and honey. Their animist religion centred on the culture hero Mareoka, while boys of ten to twelve entered adult life at the long guayuco initiation festival, receiving their first cotton loincloth.