Nutabe

The Nutabe were a Chibchan-speaking people of the Antioquia highlands, closely related to their southern neighbours the Tahamí. In the mid-sixteenth century they held the valley of Aburrá and the country between the Porce and Cauca rivers. Their clans were governed by local chiefs without any central king.

They farmed and fished, and washed gold from the Medellín River. They traded with neighbouring tribes across a wooden bridge over the San Andrés River called Bredunto in their tongue.

Spanish conquest reached them in the first half of the sixteenth century. They destroyed the bridge to slow the invaders, until governor Andrés de Valdivia had it rebuilt; in the 1570s and 1580s encomenderos forced them into wars against the Tahamí to sustain a trade in captives. Gold seekers, disease and encomienda labour broke up their communities and carried away most ancestral customs.