Zenu

The Zenú, or Sinú, are the farming people of the Sinú and San Jorge river valleys and the Caribbean shore around the Gulf of Morrosquillo in northern Colombia. Their civilization flourished from about 200 BCE onward, famous for a web of canals and raised terraces that drained half a million hectares of seasonally flooded savanna, and for lost-wax goldwork in semi-filigree packed into the graves of their chiefs.

The gold buried with the dead drew the conquistadors, and between 1510 and 1535 the Zenú chiefdoms were broken by warfare and newly introduced diseases, while the ancient canal system fell into disuse.

Under colonial rule, the Spanish crown set aside a Zenú reserve at San Andrés de Sotavento in 1773. The Zenú language itself had died out by the early 1800s, though the people survived around Sincelejo and the Sinú valley.