Ngabe

The Ngäbe, whom the Spanish called Guaymí, are the principal Chibchan-speaking people of western Panama. Before the conquest their villages stretched from the Caribbean to the Pacific, in three groupings named for their caciques Natá, Parita and Urracá.

Columbus met them on the Bocas del Toro shore in 1502 and was driven off by the chief Quibían. Urracá held the Spaniards at bay for more than seven years, forcing Captain Diego de Albitez to accept peace in 1522. Betrayed and carried in chains to Nombre de Dios, Urracá escaped to the mountains and died free in 1531.

Missionaries entered from the early 1600s, but the bands never surrendered. As ranchers and planters took the plains, the Ngäbe withdrew into the forests of Veraguas and Chiriquí, where they still held the mountains when Panama joined Colombia in the early nineteenth century.