Leyva

Villa de Leyva lies in the dry valley of Saquencipá in the Colombian Eastern Cordillera. Muisca communities inhabited the valley before Spanish conquest, leaving ceremonial sites among its hills. In 1572 Hernán Suárez de Villalobos founded the Spanish town on the orders of Andrés Díaz Venero de Leyva, president of the royal audience of New Granada. Its broad square and church became the centre of a farming settlement.

The new villa was intended to provide land for Spanish settlers and drew Indigenous labour into the colonial economy. Its houses and religious buildings grew around the large plaza, surrounded by a landscape of cultivated ground and dry hills. Antonio Nariño, a leading figure in the movement for independence, died here in 1823. The town’s history joins the older Muisca valley to the colonial and republican eras.