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Even before the Spanish conquest, the western mountainous part of Colombia attracted the bulk of the population. The more advanced Indian cultures were found in this region, and the most favorable location for the growth of civilization was the high plateau in the Cordillera Oriental of the Colombian Andes.
All were characterized by:
European exploration of the Colombian coastline was accomplished by Rodrigo de Bastidas, who in 1500–01 sailed the Caribbean coast from Cape of La Vela to Point Manzanilla in Panama, and by Francisco Pizarro, who sailed the Pacific coast in 1525. The actual conquest of Colombia began in 1525 when Bastidas founded Santa Marta on the north coast. In 1533 Pedro de Heredia founded Cartagena, which became one of the major naval and merchant marine bases of the Spanish empire.
Bogotá was founded by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada in 1538. By the end of 1539 all but one of the major inland colonial cities had been founded, as well as the most important communications centres along the routes connecting them. By mid-century the conquest was complete.
The 'New Kingdom of Granada' (as opposed to the old kingdom of Granada in Spain) was created to encompass the territories covering modern northern and central Colombia, almost all of Ecuador, Costa Rica and Panama, northern Venezuela, and north-western Guyana. These were conquered from native peoples which included the Inca, Muisca, Quimbaya, and Tairona between 1509 and 1520 and collectively turned to be Nueva Reino de Granada, or simply Nueva Granada.
Two councils in Spain presided over the colonies. The House of Trade (Casa de Contratación) controlled all overseas trade. The Supreme Council of the Indies (Consejo Supremo de las Indias) centralized the administration of the colonies and had legislative, executive, and judicial functions. As the king delegated increasingly more authority to this council, it effectively became the ruler of the colonies.
THE AUDIENCIA
The viceroyalty, headed by a viceroy, was the highest authority in the colonies. The next level of jurisdiction was the audiencia, a regional court consisting of various judges and a president. Establishment of the audiencia (an administrative and judicial tribunal) of Santafé de Bogotá in 1549 opened the colonial era. The conquerors had organized local governments in accordance with the terms of their contracts with the crown.
The president of the audiencia was the executive head of government, subject to the viceroy of Peru in administrative matters. The difficulties of travel, however, impeded communications and checked centralized control.
As commercial agriculture became the foundation of the Colombian economy, two dominant forms of agricultural landholdings emerged--the encomienda and the hacienda. These landholdings were distinguishable by the manner in which the landholders obtained labor.
The encomienda was a grant of the right to receive the tribute of Indians within a certain boundary.
In contrast, the hacienda functioned through a contract arrangement involving the owner--the hacendado--and Indian laborers. Under a typical arrangement, Indians tilled the land a specified number of days per week or per year in exchange for small plots of land.
Cities, the lowest jurisdictional level, were run by city councils, or cabildos. Cabildos initially were elected by popular vote, but later seats were sold by the crown, and positions on the council thus lost their democratic character.
Despite their low position on the administrative pyramid, cabildos had the greatest impact on the day-to-day lives of citizens in the local municipalities.
The cabildos became the first effective agency of civil government, regularizing the processes of government and tempering the authority of the governor.
Because Spaniards came to the New World in search of quick riches in the form of precious metals and jewels, mining for these items became the pillar of the economy for much of the colonial period. Indeed, the extraction of precious metals--such as gold and copper--in the American colonies formed the basis of the crown's economy.
Spain monopolized trade with the colonies. The crown limited authorization for intercontinental trade to Veracruz (in presentday Mexico), Nombre de Dios (in present-day Panama), and Cartagena. Direct trade with other colonies was prohibited; as a result, items from one colony had to be sent to Spain for reshipment to another colony.
The colony could export to Spain only precious metals, gold in particular, and some agricultural products. In return, Spain exported to the colonies most of the agricultural and manufactured goods that the colonies needed for survival. Domestic products supplemented these items only to a minor degree.
Agriculture, which was limited in the 1500s to providing subsistence for colonial settlements and immediate consumption for workers in the mines, became a dynamic enterprise in the 1600s and replaced mining as the core of the Colombian economy by the 1700s. By the end of the 1700s, sugar and tobacco had become important export commodities. The growth in agriculture resulted in part from the increasing exhaustion of mineral and metal resources in the seventeenth century, which caused the crown to reorient its economic policy to stimulate the agricultural sector.