Yariguí

The Yariguí were a Cariban-speaking people of the middle Magdalena valley in western Santander, Colombia. Nomadic hunters and gatherers, they were split into independent clans, each led by a cacique.

At the Spanish arrival in 1536 the Yariguí may have numbered some 50,000, and met the invaders with poisoned darts and ambushes. By 1570 four chiefs led attacks on boats carrying settlers and goods along the rivers.

The most celebrated leader was Pipatón, captured by the Spaniards in 1601 and maimed by having his heels cut, who escaped to fight on before surrendering late in life and dying in a Bogotá convent after 1612; his wife Yarima also led resistance. Colonial settlement and imported diseases cut the population sharply during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though the clans kept their forest independence long after the surrounding lands had been pacified.