Maloya

Maloya belonged to the coastal and foothill country south of the Baluarte River, in the territory of the Totorame. Indigenous settlements lay among the rivers that cross the plain toward the Pacific. Spanish conquest in the 1530s brought violence, while epidemic disease caused a severe fall in the population of the wider Maloya, Copala and Rosario region during the sixteenth century. Mining later became an important part of the area’s colonial economy.