The San Jorge River is a river in
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 ...
that begins in
National Park Paramillo (
departments of
Antioquia and
Córdoba) and that runs between the mountains of
San Geronimo and
Ayapel before flowing into the
River Cauca in
Sucre Department
Sucre () is a department in the Caribbean Region of Colombia. The department ranks 27th by area, and it has a population of 904,863, ranking 20th of all the 32 departments of Colombia. Sucre is bordered by the Caribbean on the northwest; by Bo ...
.
The
drainage basin
A drainage basin is an area of land where all flowing surface water converges to a single point, such as a river mouth, or flows into another body of water, such as a lake or ocean. A basin is separated from adjacent basins by a perimeter, t ...
comprises in the southeast of Córdoba Department, including the waters of
Ayapel swamp and the
Mompox region via the Caribbean departments of Cordoba, Sucre and Bolivar. Its tributaries are the rivers San Pedro, Dirty and Ure. The river registers a minimum flow of and a maximum of .
Currently the San Jorge is one of the rivers with fish wealth, but its high pollution and deterioration was due largely to fishing with explosives and obtaining
gold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile met ...
alluvium of its waters by the method of flotation
mercury
Mercury commonly refers to:
* Mercury (planet), the nearest planet to the Sun
* Mercury (element), a metallic chemical element with the symbol Hg
* Mercury (mythology), a Roman god
Mercury or The Mercury may also refer to:
Companies
* Merc ...
.
History
The San Jorge was found by the Spanish conquistador
Alonso de Heredia, while seeking to establish contact with the indigenous Zenú culture in the 1530s. At that time the river was known under the name of Xegú or Jegu and its banks flourished numerous villages of pre-Columbian society as Yape Zenú (now Ayapel, Córdoba) and Tacasuán (now
San Benito Abad). Heredia gave the name of St. George in honor of the Christian saint who fought a dragon.
In 1966 an American aviator sighted an extensive network of canals and artificial ridges along the San Jorge, finding that the "raking" was not natural but a work of human engineering. In 1986, the Colombian archaeologists Clemencia Plazas and Anna Maria Falchetti, defending this thesis, showed that the ridges and channels built on the banks of San Jorge (covering about and are the largest of the river networks of Hispanic America) were the work of the pre-Columbian Zenú society, and that the San Jorge Valley was inhabited by a highly technological society can be seen as pottery and jewelry found on the banks of the river. Consisting of an extensive network of canals, hydraulic Prehispanic San Jorge River covers an area of and was built by an ethnic group that inhabited the area between the first and fourth centuries as the limited data on the subject. As this is an area that remains flooded for several months a year, it was necessary to create a drainage system to allow the permanent establishment of the population there.
See also
*
List of rivers of Colombia
References
*Rand McNally, The New International Atlas, 1993.
Rivers of Colombia
Magdalena River
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