Lenca

The Lenca are the indigenous people of southwestern Honduras and eastern El Salvador, speaking the isolated Lencan languages. Their towns included the old trading city of Yarumela and were grouped into lordships such as Sulaco-Manianí, each ruled by a supreme lord, with headmen whom clan mothers helped to choose.

They farmed maize, paid tribute in honey and cotton cloaks, and sealed truces between lordships in the Guancasco ceremony. At the start of the sixteenth century they may have numbered over half a million.

After the Spanish invasion the Lenca rose in 1537 under the war leader Lempira, who united rival subgroups on the fortified hill of Cerquín with some 30,000 men drawn from 200 towns. His death that year broke the revolt, the Spanish town of Gracias a Dios was founded on the conquered ground, and the surviving Lenca were folded into the encomienda system.