Movima

The Movima group gathers the Movima and Cayubaba of the Llanos de Moxos, the seasonally flooded savanna of the Bolivian Beni, where each spoke its own isolate. They were semi-sedentary farmers who raised terraces, hunted, fished and gathered wild fruit.

The priest Gregorio de Bolívar was the first European to reach the Movima, in 1621, and in 1700 Father Altamirano counted some twenty thousand of them in eighty small settlements. The Jesuit Agustín Zapata found seven Cayubaba villages in 1693, and in 1704 the Cayubaba were gathered into the Exaltación de la Santa Cruz mission. The Jesuits then drew both peoples into reductions such as San Lorenzo, opened in 1708.