Movima

The Movima are an indigenous people of the Bolivian Amazon, whose homeland is the river country of the Beni lowlands. Before European contact they were semi-sedentary farmers who cultivated raised terraces in the seasonally flooded savanna and rounded out their diet with hunting, fishing and gathering wild fruit, and their Movima language is a linguistic isolate, with no proven kinship to any other tongue.

The first European to reach them was the priest Gregorio de Bolívar in 1621, and in 1700 Father Altamirano estimated some twenty thousand Movima living in eighty small settlements.

Jesuit missionaries then founded a string of reductions: Baltasar Espinoza opened San Lorenzo in 1708 but was killed there in 1709, while the later missions of Santa Ana, San Borja and Reyes gradually drew the Movima into settled, Spanish-speaking parish life through the eighteenth century.