Sinu

The Sinu, or Zenu, were the farming people of the Sinu and San Jorge river valleys and the Gulf of Morrosquillo in northern Colombia. Their civilization drained seasonally flooded savanna with a network of canals and raised terraces, and its goldsmiths packed the graves of chiefs with gold.

That gold drew the conquistadors, and between 1510 and 1535 warfare and epidemics broke the Zenu chiefdoms. In 1773 the Spanish crown set aside the reserve of San Andres de Sotavento for them. The Zenu language had died out by the early 1800s.