jueves, 9 de diciembre de 2010

History: Boyacá

The territory of present day Boyaca was during the Pre-Columbian time a domain of the Muiscas indigenous peoples. The Muiscas under the chiefdom of El Zaque of Hunza lived mainly by agriculture and mining.
The first European to discover the area was the Spaniard Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada who conquered and distributed the land in encomiendas and forced the indigenous people to work for him.
In 1539, Gonzalo Suárez Rendón, a Spanish colonist, founded the village of Tunja and other sites where the indigenous people previously had their villages. The village of Tunja became one of the main political and economic centers for the Spanish during the Viceroyalty of New Granada.
During the 19th Century Boyaca was battleground for numerous confrontations between the royalist and patriot armies led by Simón Bolívar during the Spanish colonies' war of independence from Spain. Two of the most decisive battles were the Battle of Boyacá and the Vargas Swamp Battle (1819) won by the patriot forces against the royalists.
After the creation of the Granadine Confederation by 1858 the territory of now Boyaca became the Sovereign State of Boyacá. It was later rearranged in territory and administration and renamed as "Department of Boyaca" after a series of civil wars like the Colombian Civil War (1860-1862) and the Thousand Days War that struggled over a centralist or federalist system and political instability that changed to many constitutions (such as the Constitution of 1886), Boyaca finally acquired its current definition as territory.

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