Pijao

Pijao was the language of federated chiefdoms in the Colombian Andes, spread across the Central Cordillera and the upper valleys of the Magdalena and Cauca rivers. At the Spanish entrada of the 1530s they were organized in two leagues, one on the upper Magdalena plains and one in the mountain forests.

Their priests, called mohanes, led animist rites centred on rivers and mountain spirits, with idols of gold and wood. The conquistadors met fierce resistance, and the Pijao wars over control of waterways lasted some eighty years into the early seventeenth century, ending in defeat, conversion to Catholicism and mixing with Spanish settlers.

Pijao was only fragmentarily recorded and has never been convincingly assigned to a language family; it died out as surviving communities adopted Spanish.