Gorrones

Gorrones was a name recorded by Spanish observers for Indigenous communities of the Cauca valley and the slopes of Colombia's Western Cordillera. Pedro Cieza de León explained that the Spaniards adopted it from a fish name they heard as people brought their catch to the newly established settlement of Cali. It was therefore an outsider's designation, preserving a particular encounter rather than necessarily the communities' own collective name.

Cieza's descriptions connect upland dwellings with the resources of the valley below. People descended to the Cauca and its wetlands to fish, while maize cultivation also linked the slopes and river plain. Their large houses stood in groups rather than in one continuous city. These accounts describe a populated and productive landscape at the time of the sixteenth-century conquest. Fishing, cultivation and movement between elevations gave the communities their livelihood, while the name attached to them in colonial writing foregrounded the catch that Spanish settlers encountered.