Teyuna

Teyuna, called Buritaca-200 by archaeologists, sits on a mountain spur above the Buritaca River in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, close to the Caribbean. It was built around 700 to 800 CE by the Tairona, and it was probably the political, trading and religious heart of a network of Tairona villages scattered over the slopes. Between two thousand and eight thousand people may have lived there in about a thousand houses. Its builders cut the steep ridge into stone-faced terraces for houses, with retaining walls up to seven metres high, stairways, tiled paths and small circular plazas.

Tairona is a Spanish name taken from the chiefdom of Tairo; the people of the four mountain groups speak of themselves as sons of the jaguar. The Tairona farmed the slopes, grew maize and cassava, and worked gold, pottery and stone. At first they tolerated the Spanish who founded Santa Marta on the coast in the 1520s, but confrontations grew until, by about 1600, a small part of the Tairona moved up into the high stretches of the Sierra. Teyuna was abandoned during the conquest, some say as late as 1650, and the Kogi, Wiwa, Arhuaco and Kankuamo descend from its people and keep it as sacred ground.