Tado

Tadó grew as a mining settlement in the humid forests of Chocó, in the San Juan River basin. During the colonial period its gold deposits were worked largely by enslaved Africans, under the authority of mine owners and officials of the province of Nóvita. Rivers and streams provided the routes through the forest and carried the gold-bearing sediments on which the mining economy depended.

The history of Tadó also includes resistance to enslavement. Local memory recalls Barulé and the enslaved men Mateo Mina and Antonio Mina, associated with an uprising in the late 1720s. The mining district connected the remote Pacific lowlands to the wealth of New Granada, but its people faced coercion and struggled to create lives and communities along the rivers.