Pijao

The Pijao were a federation of peoples in the central Colombian Andes, spread through the Central Cordillera, the upper Magdalena valley and the upper Cauca. They never formed a centralised state, living instead as allied chiefdoms. Their priests, called mohanes, led animist rituals centred on water, mountains and idols of gold, clay and wood.

Fields of maize and manioc supported dense populations. The Pijao met the Spanish with long resistance, fighting over access to the Magdalena, Cauca and Saldaña rivers in the Pijao wars, which lasted some eighty years.

Between 1605 and 1615 Juan de Borja y Armendia, president of the Audiencia of Santafé, led pacification campaigns, founding Natagaima in 1606 to settle the survivors. War deaths, Catholic conversion and mixing with settlers broke the federation, though Pijao communities kept their identity around Coyaima and Natagaima.