A Spanish Colombian is a Colombian of Spanish descent. Since the vast majority of Colombians are of at least partial Spanish descent and their culture is predominantly derived from Spain, it is a rarely used term and Spanish-Colombians identify as such.
History
The Spanish arrived in Colombia in 1499 to conquer the land. They built several settlements in territories of the
Chibcha
The Muisca (also called Chibcha) are an indigenous people and culture of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense, Colombia, that formed the Muisca Confederation before the Spanish conquest. The people spoke Muysccubun, a language of the Chibchan lan ...
Confederation and placed a new order of the territory according to the interests of each group conqueror. This ordinance responded to resources that were in the settlements, a process which is generally not taken into account the views of the people who lived there. These establishments continued for the next three centuries with an expansion and colonial warrior, besides introducing a large number of black African population as slave labor, progress on
indigenous peoples
Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...
and
palenqueros
Palenquero (sometimes spelled Palenkero) or Palenque ( pln, Lengua) is a Spanish-based creole language spoken in Colombia. It is believed to be a mixture of Kikongo (a language spoken in central Africa in the current countries of Congo, DRC, G ...
that newspapers were subject to displacement.
In 1499 the Spanish explorer
Alonso de Ojeda
Alonso de Ojeda (; c. 1466 – c. 1515) was a Spanish explorer, governor and conquistador. He travelled through modern-day Guyana, Venezuela, Trinidad, Tobago, Curaçao, Aruba and Colombia. He navigated with Amerigo Vespucci who is famous ...
arrived on the coast of northern Colombia (
Cabo de la Vela
Cabo de la Vela (Spanish for "cape of sails") is a headland in the Guajira Peninsula in Colombia with an adjacent small fishing village. It is a popular ecotourism destination of the Caribbean region of Colombia
History
Spanish explorer Juan ...
). In 1501
Rodrigo de Bastidas
Rodrigo de Bastidas (; Triana, Seville, Andalusia, c. 1465 – Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, 28 July 1527) was a Spanish conquistador and explorer who mapped the northern coast of South America, discovered Panama, and founded the city of Santa Marta.
...
crossed the coast between
Cartagena de Indias
Cartagena ( , also ), known since the colonial era as Cartagena de Indias (), is a city and one of the major ports on the northern coast of Colombia in the Caribbean Coast Region, bordering the Caribbean sea. Cartagena's past role as a link ...
and
La Guajira
La Guajira () is a department of Colombia. It occupies most of the Guajira Peninsula in the northeast region of the country, on the Caribbean Sea and bordering Venezuela, at the northernmost tip of South America. The capital city of the departm ...
and
Magdalena River
The Magdalena River ( es, Río Magdalena, ; less commonly ) is the main river of Colombia, flowing northward about through the western half of the country. It takes its name from the biblical figure Mary Magdalene. It is navigable through much of ...
discovered. In 1510 Alonso de Ojeda founded
San Sebastián de Urabá
San Sebastián de Urabá was the first settlement established by Spaniards in the area of the Darién Gap in Colombia.
This fortified settlement was founded on 20 January 1510 by Alonso de Ojeda on the eastern coast of the Gulf of Urabá, in what ...
, the first Spanish settlement on the mainland, but that same year its provisional ruler, Francisco Pizarro, decided to leave and moved to a site in the Gulf of Urabá and founded under the direction of
Martín Fernández de Enciso
Martín Fernández de Enciso ( 1470 – 1528) was a Spanish lawyer, colonial official and geographer. He was intrumental in the colonization of the Isthmus of Darien, one of Spain's earliest attempts to occupy the mainland of the Americas. His ...
to
Santa María la Antigua del Darién
Santa María la Antigua del Darién—turned into Dariena in the Latin of Decades of the New World, De Orbo Novo—was a Spanish colonization of the Americas, Spanish colonial town founded in 1510 by Vasco Núñez de Balboa, located in present-d ...
. This city, the capital of the first Spanish governor in the Castilla del Oro, was in turn abandoned in 1517. With Santa Marta (1525) and Cartagena (1533), established the Spanish control of the coast. The conquistador
Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada
Gonzalo may refer to:
* Gonzalo (name)
* Gonzalo, Dominican Republic, a small town
* Isla Gonzalo, a subantarctic island operated by the Chilean Navy
* Hurricane Gonzalo, 2014
See also
* Gonzalez (disambiguation)
* Gonzales (disambiguation)
* ...
entered a vast area in the central region of
Cundinamarca and
Boyacá, conquering the powerful Chibcha culture, founding the city of Santa Fe de Bogota, Tunja ordering founding Gonzalo Suarez Rendon and naming the
New Kingdom of Granada
The New Kingdom of Granada ( es, Nuevo Reino de Granada), or Kingdom of the New Granada, was the name given to a group of 16th-century Spanish colonial provinces in northern South America governed by the president of the Royal Audience of Santa ...
region.
To establish a civil government in New Granada created a Real Audiencia in Santa Fe de Bogota in 1548-1549. The Royal Court was a body that combined executive and judicial authority until the establishment of a presidency or governorship in 1564 assuming executive powers. Until 1550 the territory of Colombia was formed by the governors of
Santa Marta
Santa Marta (), officially Distrito Turístico, Cultural e Histórico de Santa Marta ("Touristic, Cultural and Historic District of Santa Marta"), is a city on the coast of the Caribbean Sea in northern Colombia. It is the capital of Magdalena ...
and Cartagena, which were subject to the
Audiencia of Santo Domingo, and Popayan that was subject to the
viceroyalty of Peru
The Viceroyalty of Peru ( es, Virreinato del Perú, links=no) was a Spanish imperial provincial administrative district, created in 1542, that originally contained modern-day Peru and most of the Spanish Empire in South America, governed from ...
. The jurisdiction of the Real Audiencia de Santa Fe de Bogotá include these governorates since 1550 and was extended in time over the surrounding provinces that were forming around the country corresponding to the New Granada.
In 1717
Santa Fe de Bogotá
Santa Claus, also known as Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, Saint Nick, Kris Kringle, or simply Santa, is a legendary figure originating in Western Christian culture who is said to bring children gifts during the late evening and overnight ...
would become the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, although suspended in 1724 due to financial problems, was reinstated in 1740 and continued until the loss of Spanish power over the territories in the 1810s.
The
paisas
A Paisa is someone from a region in the northwest of Colombia, including part of the Cordillera Occidental (Colombia), West and Cordillera Central (Colombia), Central ''cordilleras'' of the Andean natural region, Andes in Colombia. The Paisa ...
have been considered an isolated population, and therefore different. They are mostly of Spanish descent, because Spanish men who settled in the region during the 16th and 17th centuries were accompanied by their wives. The mountains isolated the population until the late 19th century, when Antioquia entered the industrial revolution.
[Bedoya G, Montoya P, Garcia J, Soto I, Bourgeois S, Carvajal L, Labuda D, Alvarez V, Ospina J, Hedrick PW, Ruiz-Linares A. Admixture dynamics in Hispanics: A shift in the nuclear genetic ancestry of a South American population isolate. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006 Apr 2, "Ancestro europeo de los antioqueños".]
During the
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War ( es, Guerra Civil Española)) or The Revolution ( es, La Revolución, link=no) among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War ( es, Cuarta Guerra Carlista, link=no) among Carlists, and The Rebellion ( es, La Rebelión, lin ...
, thousands of Spaniards fled from Spain to Colombia. Over the course of General
Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco Bahamonde (; 4 December 1892 – 20 November 1975) was a Spanish general who led the Nationalist faction (Spanish Civil War), Nationalist forces in overthrowing the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War ...
's dictatorship many thousands more fled in fear of the regime. The Spanish republicans fled Franco's regime as well, seeking to escape retribution from the new government.
See also
*
Colombia–Spain relations
Colombian-Spain relations are the bilateral relations between the Kingdom of Spain and the Republic of Colombia, formally established in 1881, several decades after Colombia's independence from the Spanish Empire. Both nations are members of the O ...
References
{{Colombian people
Spanish diaspora in South America
Colombia
Colombia (, ; ), officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country in South America with insular regions in North America—near Nicaragua's Caribbean coast—as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Car ...
Ethnic groups in Colombia
European Colombian