Charrua

Charrua is the name given to a small family of poorly documented tongues of the Plata basin, once heard across Uruguay, the Argentine province of Entre Rios and perhaps parts of Paraguay. Its recorded members are Chana, whose speakers called it Lantek, Mbegua, Guenoa and Charrua itself, carried by semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers who fished the shore in summer and hunted deer and rhea inland with bolas and bows.

The Jesuit Pedro Lozano records that these peoples killed the explorer Juan Diaz de Solis during his voyage of 1515 up the Rio de la Plata. The Charrua and Chana long resisted Spanish settlement.

From the eighteenth century cattle ranching enclosed their hunting grounds and turned famine into a way of life, answered by mounted raids known as malones. The speakers' independent life ended in 1831 with the Massacre of Salsipuedes, when the Uruguayan army destroyed the Charrua camps and dispersed the survivors.