Purun awqa

The Purun awqa, known to Spanish chronicles as the Promaucae, were Mapudungun-speaking farmers of central Chile who held the valleys between the Maipo and Maule rivers. Their name is Quechua for wild enemy, the Inca label for peoples beyond their rule. They irrigated fields and built a rope bridge over the Cachapoal River.

Late in the fifteenth century they and their allies met Túpac Inca Yupanqui's army in the Battle of the Maule, a three-day struggle without a victor that fixed the southern edge of the Inca Empire.

They resisted Pedro de Valdivia for three years before being overrun in 1544; in 1557 a thousand warriors fought beside Lautaro at Peteroa, where the Spaniards destroyed his camp. Encomiendas, planned Indian towns and intermarriage dissolved their separate identity over the colonial centuries.