Arauca

Arauca stands on the river of the same name in the northern Llanos, a broad plain of savannas and seasonal wetlands. The Arauca flows east toward the Orinoco, providing a route through a region inhabited by Indigenous communities before Spanish settlement. In 1780 the priest Juan Isidro Daboín founded Santa Bárbara de Arauca on the site of an Indigenous hamlet and began a church.

The settlement grew on a frontier linked by river to the Venezuelan plains and by overland routes to the Andean foothills. Cattle raising spread across the Llanos during the colonial period, while the rise and fall of the river shaped travel and pasture. In the wars of independence, the plains supplied horsemen and livestock to armies moving between New Granada and Venezuela. Arauca’s position on the river placed it within this wider world of shifting frontiers and mobile communities.