Matagalpa

The Matagalpa were the Misumalpan-speaking people of the central Nicaraguan highlands, around Sébaco, Matagalpa and Jinotega. Farmers of maize, beans and cacao, they developed a village culture between the ninth and tenth centuries, leaving carved metates, pottery and stone statues.

They were among the first Nicaraguan peoples to meet the Spanish in arms, attacking the troops of Francisco Hernández de Córdoba and Hernando de Soto in 1525. They rose in 1643, 1688 and 1773. Missionary work began at Sébaco in 1530; a tribute count of 1581 records only seventy-five taxpayers in the Matagalpa villages.

From 1628 Mercedarian friars settled them in reductions such as San Pedro de Metapa. The English privateer Henry Morgan sacked Matagalpa in 1643, and by the late eighteenth century the highlands were studded with Spanish parishes and reductions.