Muisca

The Muisca, or Chibcha, were the Indigenous people of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense, the high fertile basins of the Eastern Andes in present-day Colombia, and spoke Muysccubun of the Chibchan language family. They lived in a loose confederation headed by the zipa of Muyquytá on the Bogotá savanna, the zaque of Hunza, later Tunja, and the iraca priest-ruler of Sugamuxi, the sacred City of the Sun. Skilled farmers of maize, potatoes and quinoa on irrigated terraces, they were called the Salt People for the mines of Zipaquirá and Nemocón, and bartered salt, emeralds from the Tenza Valley and finely worked gold tunjos at regional markets. The gold-dust ritual in which a new ruler offered treasure to the goddess of Lake Guatavita fed the Spanish legend of El Dorado, and their priests served the sun god Sué and moon goddess Chía with a lunisolar calendar.

In the spring of 1536 Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada led an expedition inland from Santa Marta in quest of that golden kingdom; first contact came in 1537, and by 1540 the conquest of the Muisca was complete. Quesada founded Santa Fe de Bogotá in 1538 on the zipa's lands, which became the seat of the New Kingdom of Granada. Missionaries and encomenderos resettled the Muisca into parishes and reservations, and their numbers fell sharply through disease and assimilation, though many customs survived into the years around Colombian independence in 1810, when the new republic began dissolving the old Indigenous reservations.