Esquegua

Esquegua was the name recorded in early Spanish accounts for an Indigenous chief and his territory in the uplands of central Panama. Its country lay in steep mountains near the later town of Chitra, apart from the lowland chiefdom of Parita. Routes through Esquegua's and neighbouring Urraca lands crossed difficult hill country, which the chronicler Oviedo described as a hard way across the isthmus. In the early sixteenth-century conquest, Spanish parties sent into the territory met determined resistance. Captains returned from these expeditions after attacks by stones and missiles thrown from above, without having subdued the country.