Nicarao

The Nicarao are the southernmost Nahua people, a branch of the Pipil who speak Nahuat and settled western Nicaragua and northwestern Costa Rica. Their Toltec ancestors began drifting south from Aridoamerica and Chiapas around 700, and around 1200 the future Nicarao entered the Greater Nicoya region.

They called their land dotted with lakes Nicanahuac, meaning the place surrounded by water, and held the islands of Ometepe and Zapatera in Lake Nicaragua sacred.

Gil González Dávila first probed their coast in 1522 but was driven back to his ships; in 1524 Francisco Hernández de Córdoba founded the towns of León and Granada on Nicarao land. War, epidemics and mass slave exports reduced the native population to a remnant within a century of the conquest.