Jirajaran

The Jirajara, who called themselves the Xideharas, were an Indigenous people of the mountains of western Venezuela; tradition holds they came from Lake Maracaibo's shores. They lived in densely populated villages under elder caciques, farming, hunting and gathering and treating neighbours as enemies.

The German explorer Ambrosio Alfinger noted them in the Serranía del Empalado in 1529. In 1553 Jirajara labourers joined enslaved black miners of San Felipe de Buría in Miguel de Buría's revolt; he was crowned king of a mountain cumbe before Spanish troops stormed the refuge and killed him.

Settlers branded resisting Jirajaras caribes to justify enslaving them, and failed to take gold-bearing Nirgua, where the Jirajara repelled incursions until a Spanish governor defeated them in 1628. Siquisique was founded in about 1685; their tongue, kin to Ayomán, survives only in colonial word lists of the isolated Jirajaran languages.