Yukpa

The Yukpa are a Cariban-speaking people of the Serranía del Perijá, between the Cesar valley and Lake Maracaibo. Their communities inhabit mountain valleys and slopes, cultivating land in a landscape of forest and streams. Colonial accounts place their territory between the river plains and the mountains that rise west of the lake.

Spanish incursions reached the wider region in the sixteenth century, and Yukpa communities faced pressure on their lands. Some families later moved towards lower ground under colonial assurances of security and were organised into encomiendas. Capuchin missionaries sought contact with groups in the range from the late seventeenth century. Farther south, San Carlos del Zulia was founded in 1778 during a colonial campaign directed against Indigenous inhabitants of the lake basin.