Tulua

Tuluá lies in the Cauca valley beside a river descending from the Central Cordillera. Indigenous people inhabited this fertile country before Spanish land grants transformed the valley. In the seventeenth century Juan de Lemos y Aguirre held land between the Tuluá and Morales rivers; a document of 1639 records his houses near the river and is associated with the growth of the colonial settlement.

The surrounding valley supported agriculture and livestock, linked by roads to Buga and other towns along the Cauca. In the early nineteenth century the region was drawn into the wars of independence that divided royalist and republican forces. The river continued to connect the mountain slopes with the plain, shaping the fields and settlements along its banks.