The history of Colombia

Colombia sits where South America meets the isthmus of Panama, with coasts on both the Caribbean and the Pacific and three Andean ranges running through its interior. That position made it one of the first corridors through which people entered the continent, and later the home of the Muisca, the Tairona, the Zenú and many other Indigenous societies famed for their goldwork. Spain conquered the region in the sixteenth century and ruled it from Bogotá as New Granada. After independence, won under Simón Bolívar in 1819, Colombia kept an unusually long record of civilian, elected government, but its history has also been marked by civil wars between Liberals and Conservatives, the loss of Panama, La Violencia of the mid-twentieth century and more than half a century of armed conflict involving guerrillas, paramilitaries, drug traffickers and the state.

Some of the oldest traces of people in South America come from Colombia. Stone tools at Pubenza in the Magdalena valley have been dated to about 16,000 years ago, and hunter-gatherers were camping in the rock shelters of El Abra, Tibitó and Tequendama on the plateau around Bogotá between roughly 12,500 and 11,000 years ago, hunting deer and the last of the Ice Age megafauna around now-vanished lakes. On the Caribbean lowlands, shell-mound villages such as San Jacinto and Puerto Hormiga produced pottery from about 5000 to 3000 BCE, among the earliest ceramics anywhere in the Americas.

Between about 5000 and 1000 BCE, people across the region shifted to farming maize, beans, cassava and potatoes and settled in permanent villages. Over the following two thousand years distinct regional cultures emerged. In the upper Magdalena valley the people of San Agustín carved hundreds of stone statues of guardians, animals and deities to stand over their tombs, mostly in the first eight centuries CE, while nearby at Tierradentro others dug painted underground burial chambers into the hillsides. On the floodplains of the Sinú and San Jorge rivers, the Zenú built an enormous system of raised fields and drainage canals that let them farm land that flooded every year. In the Cauca valley the Quimbaya made some of the finest gold objects of the ancient Americas, and the Calima, Tolima and Tumaco cultures each developed their own styles in gold and pottery.

By the time Europeans arrived, the most populous society was that of the Muisca, Chibcha-speaking farmers of the high plateau of Cundinamarca and Boyacá. They grew maize, potatoes and quinoa on terraced and ridged fields, wove cotton cloth, mined emeralds and controlled the salt springs of Zipaquirá and Nemocón, whose salt they traded far beyond the highlands. Muisca society was organised into chiefdoms whose rulers inherited office through the female line. These chiefdoms grouped themselves into several confederations, the strongest centred on Bacatá, near modern Bogotá, under a ruler called the zipa, and on Hunza, modern Tunja, under the zaque, with Sogamoso and Duitama also powerful. Sogamoso held the great temple of the sun god Sué, and the Muisca kept a calendar based on counting in twenties. When a new ruler of Guatavita took office, he was covered in gold dust and washed it off in the sacred lake while offerings of gold were thrown into the water, a ceremony that gave rise to the European legend of El Dorado.

To the north, in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the Tairona built stone-paved towns linked by stairways and roads, the largest of which, Teyuna, known today as Ciudad Perdida, was founded around 800 CE. Lowland Tairona fished and made salt, highland Tairona grew crops, and the two exchanged goods. Their descendants, the Kogi, Arhuaco, Wiwa and Kankuamo, still live in the Sierra. Elsewhere lived Carib- and Arawak-speaking peoples on the coasts and in the Amazon and Orinoco basins, the Panche and Pijao of the Magdalena valley, who fiercely resisted outsiders, and the many peoples of the Pacific rainforest. In the far south, the Inca Empire had pushed its frontier into the Pasto country just before the Spanish arrived.

Alonso de Ojeda sailed along the Guajira peninsula in 1499, a few years after Christopher Columbus had first crossed the Atlantic, and Rodrigo de Bastidas followed in 1500. After several failed attempts at settlement, the Spanish founded Santa Marta in 1525 and Cartagena in 1533, on the site of the Indigenous village of Calamarí. Cartagena grew rich at first on gold looted from Zenú tombs and soon became the main port of the region.

The conquest of the interior came from three directions at once. Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada marched up the Magdalena from Santa Marta in 1536 and reached the Muisca plateau the next year. Divided between the zipa Tisquesusa and the zaque Quemuenchatocha, the Muisca could not combine against the invaders, and both rulers died during the conquest. Quesada founded Santa Fe de Bogotá in August 1538 at the site of a Muisca settlement. Sebastián de Belalcázar, coming north from the conquest of Quito, had already founded Cali and Popayán, and the German Nikolaus Federmann, working for the Welser banking house, crossed the eastern plains from Venezuela. The three met on the plateau in 1539 and took their rival claims to Spain.

Conquest was followed by catastrophe for Indigenous peoples. Epidemics of smallpox, measles and other diseases, forced labour in mines and on estates under the encomienda system, warfare and the breakdown of communities caused the population to fall drastically over the sixteenth century. The Tairona were defeated after a long resistance that ended around 1600, while many lowland peoples were destroyed or pushed into remote forests.

The Spanish crown set up a royal court, the Audiencia of Santa Fe, in Bogotá in 1549, and the territory became known as the New Kingdom of Granada, part of the Spanish Empire and governed at first under the Viceroyalty of Peru. In 1717 Bogotá became the seat of a new Viceroyalty of New Granada, which was abolished in 1723 and permanently restored in 1739, covering what are now Colombia, Panama, Ecuador and Venezuela.

Gold, mined largely in Antioquia and the Pacific lowlands of the Chocó, was the colony's main export. As Indigenous labour declined, the Spanish turned to enslaved Africans, and Cartagena became one of the principal ports of the Atlantic slave trade in Spanish America, as well as the seat of a tribunal of the Inquisition from 1610. Enslaved people resisted, and runaways known as cimarrones founded fortified free communities called palenques. The most famous, San Basilio de Palenque near Cartagena, traced to the maroon leader Benkos Biohó in the early seventeenth century, won recognition from the Spanish authorities in the early eighteenth century and still keeps its own Creole language. In the highlands, surviving Indigenous communities were gathered onto communal lands called resguardos, while a growing mixed-race mestizo population came to form the majority.

Cartagena's massive fortifications made it one of the strongest cities in the Americas, and in 1741 its defenders, led by Blas de Lezo, beat off a large British fleet under Admiral Edward Vernon. In the later eighteenth century the Bourbon reforms raised taxes and tightened royal control. In 1781 the Comuneros revolt broke out in Socorro and drew thousands of peasants, Indigenous people and Creoles towards Bogotá before the leaders were persuaded to disband; one of them, José Antonio Galán, was executed the following year. The ideas of the Enlightenment spread through the Royal Botanical Expedition led by José Celestino Mutis, and in the 1790s Antonio Nariño printed a Spanish translation of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, for which he was imprisoned.

The crisis came from Europe. When Napoleon forced the Spanish king to abdicate in 1808 during the Napoleonic Wars, towns across New Granada formed juntas, and on 20 July 1810 Bogotá's Creoles removed the viceroy. The years that followed, later mocked as the Patria Boba or "foolish fatherland", were spent in quarrels between centralists in Cundinamarca led by Nariño and a federation of other provinces. In 1815 and 1816 a Spanish army under Pablo Morillo besieged and took Cartagena and reconquered the interior, executing many patriot leaders, including the scientist Francisco José de Caldas. The young seamstress Policarpa Salavarrieta, shot in Bogotá in 1817 for spying for the patriots, became a national heroine.

The decisive campaign came from the east. Simón Bolívar, who had been fighting in Venezuela, joined forces with Francisco de Paula Santander, crossed the flooded plains and the high Andes in 1819 and defeated the royalists at the Battle of Boyacá on 7 August, opening the way to Bogotá. In December the Congress of Angostura proclaimed a Republic of Colombia, usually called Gran Colombia, uniting New Granada and Venezuela, joined later by Panama and Ecuador. The Constitution of Cúcuta of 1821 made Bolívar president and Santander vice-president, and a law of the same year freed the future children of enslaved mothers. These campaigns were part of the wider Spanish American wars of independence.

While Bolívar led armies south to Quito and Peru, Santander governed in Bogotá, and the two drifted apart. Bolívar favoured a strong central government, while Santander defended constitutional rule and regional interests. After an attempt on Bolívar's life in Bogotá in 1828, Santander was sent into exile. Venezuela and Ecuador broke away in 1830, and Bolívar resigned and died near Santa Marta in December of that year.

The remaining territory became the Republic of New Granada, with Santander as its first elected president from 1832. Followers of the Bolívar and Santander traditions hardened into the Conservative and Liberal parties, both founded around 1848 and 1849. Conservatives generally stood for central authority, the Catholic Church and order, Liberals for federalism, free trade, the separation of church and state and wider voting rights. Their rivalry produced repeated civil wars, beginning with the War of the Supremes from 1839 to 1842.

At mid-century the Liberals carried through sweeping reforms. Slavery was abolished in 1851, taking effect on the first day of 1852, the Jesuits were expelled, and the constitution of 1853 gave the vote to all adult men. The country was renamed the Granadine Confederation in 1858, and the Liberal constitution of Rionegro in 1863 created the United States of Colombia, a loose federation of nine sovereign states with strong guarantees of civil liberties. In the 1880s the president Rafael Núñez led a movement called the Regeneration, which with Conservative support replaced federalism with the centralist constitution of 1886 and a concordat with the Church. The country took its present name, the Republic of Colombia, and that constitution lasted until 1991.

Conflict between the parties culminated in the Thousand Days' War of 1899 to 1902, which cost around 100,000 lives. In its aftermath, the United States, whose plans for a canal across Panama had been blocked by the Colombian senate, backed a rising in Panama in November 1903 and immediately recognised Panama as independent. Colombia eventually accepted the loss in a treaty under which the United States paid compensation of 25 million dollars, ratified in 1921.

In the early twentieth century coffee, grown largely by smallholders on the slopes of Antioquia and the central Andes, became the country's main export and drew settlers into new regions. Banana plantations owned by the United Fruit Company spread along the Caribbean coast, and in December 1928 soldiers opened fire on striking banana workers at Ciénaga, an event later woven into the novels of Gabriel García Márquez. The Great Depression helped end decades of Conservative rule, and from 1930 to 1946 a series of Liberal governments, above all that of Alfonso López Pumarejo, expanded state education, recognised trade unions and passed a land law. A brief border war with Peru over the Amazon port of Leticia in 1932 and 1933 ended with Colombia keeping the town. During World War II Colombia sided with the Allies.

The Conservatives returned to power in 1946, and political violence spread through the countryside. On 9 April 1948 the popular Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was shot dead in central Bogotá, and the riots that followed, known as the Bogotazo, left much of the city centre burned and many hundreds dead. The years from the late 1940s to the late 1950s are remembered as La Violencia, a largely rural war in which Liberal and Conservative supporters, police and armed bands killed one another's neighbours, often with great cruelty. Estimates of the dead range from about 200,000 to 300,000, and many more were driven from their land. In 1953 General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla seized power, one of only a handful of military takeovers in Colombia's history, and offered amnesties that reduced the fighting. Women gained the vote under his rule and first used it in 1957, the year he was forced out.

To end the bloodshed, the two parties agreed in 1957 to a National Front, approved by a plebiscite, under which they alternated the presidency every four years from 1958 to 1974 and shared all public offices equally. The arrangement ended the partisan war and brought reforms, including a land reform agency, but it also shut out other political forces. In the climate of the Cold War and inspired in part by Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba, armed movements took shape. After the army attacked the peasant enclave of Marquetalia in 1964, communist-aligned fighters under Manuel Marulanda formed what became the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the FARC. The National Liberation Army, the ELN, influenced by the Cuban model and liberation theology, appeared the same year, followed by the Maoist EPL and, in the 1970s, the mainly urban M-19, born of anger at the disputed presidential election of 1970.

From the 1970s Colombia became the centre of the world cocaine trade. The Medellín cartel led by Pablo Escobar and the rival Cali cartel built vast fortunes and fought the state's attempts to extradite traffickers to the United States with bombings and assassinations. The justice minister Rodrigo Lara was murdered in 1984, and in 1989 and 1990 three presidential candidates were killed, including the Liberal Luis Carlos Galán. In November 1985 the M-19 seized the Palace of Justice in Bogotá; the army's assault to retake it left around a hundred people dead, among them several Supreme Court justices. A peace process in the mid-1980s led to the founding of the Patriotic Union party by former FARC members and others, but thousands of its members, including two presidential candidates, were murdered by paramilitaries, traffickers and members of the security forces.

The M-19 and several smaller groups laid down their arms around 1990, and a constituent assembly that included former guerrillas wrote the constitution of 1991. It recognised Colombia as a multiethnic and pluricultural nation, gave Indigenous peoples self-government over their resguardos and opened the way for collective land titles for Afro-Colombian communities of the Pacific coast. Escobar was killed by police in Medellín in December 1993.

The 1990s nonetheless brought the conflict to its peak. The FARC and ELN grew rich on the drug trade, kidnapping and extortion, and overran military bases. Landowners and traffickers financed paramilitary groups, which in 1997 joined in the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, the AUC, and carried out massacres of civilians they accused of helping the guerrillas. Peace talks with the FARC in a demilitarised zone around San Vicente del Caguán from 1998 collapsed in 2002, while the United States poured military aid into the country through Plan Colombia. The president Álvaro Uribe, elected in 2002 and re-elected in 2006, pursued a hard-line "democratic security" policy that pushed the guerrillas back and negotiated the demobilisation of the AUC. His supporters credit him with restoring security; critics point to abuses, above all the "false positives" scandal, in which soldiers killed civilians and presented them as guerrillas killed in combat. A 2008 raid on a FARC camp just inside Ecuador caused a diplomatic crisis with Ecuador and Venezuela.

Uribe's successor, Juan Manuel Santos, opened talks with the FARC in Havana in 2012. A final agreement was announced in 2016, but on 2 October voters narrowly rejected it in a referendum, by 50.2 to 49.8 percent. Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the same month, and a revised agreement was signed in November and approved by Congress. The FARC handed over its weapons in 2017 and became a political party, and a Special Jurisdiction for Peace and a Truth Commission were set up. According to Colombia's National Centre for Historical Memory, around 220,000 people died in the conflict between 1958 and 2013, most of them civilians, and more than five million were displaced. The Truth Commission's 2022 report attributed the largest share of civilian deaths to paramilitaries, followed by guerrillas and then state forces. Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, often living in the areas most contested by armed groups, suffered disproportionately.

The agreement ended the war with the FARC as an organisation, but not the violence. Dissident FARC factions, the ELN and armed groups descended from the paramilitaries fought over coca regions and smuggling routes. Colombia also took in large numbers of refugees and migrants from Venezuela, and in 2019 offered citizenship to more than 24,000 children of Venezuelan refugees born on its soil.

Iván Duque, a critic of the peace deal from Uribe's party, was president from 2018 to 2022. Mass protests began in April 2021 against a proposed tax reform and widened into a broader movement over inequality and police violence. In 2022 Gustavo Petro, a former M-19 guerrilla, won the presidency with 50.47 percent of the vote, becoming the first left-wing president in the country's history, and restored diplomatic relations with Venezuela. His government sought negotiations with the remaining armed groups, but in January 2025 fighting between the ELN and FARC dissidents in the Catatumbo region killed around 80 people and drove thousands from their homes. In June 2025 the opposition senator and presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot at a campaign event in Bogotá; he died that August.

In the 2026 presidential election the right-wing lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella defeated Petro's ally Iván Cepeda in a run-off on 21 June by 49.66 to 48.70 percent, one of the closest results in the country's history. Cepeda conceded, and de la Espriella was sworn in on 7 August 2026. Colombia enters this new period still confronting the legacy of its long conflict, the cocaine economy and deep regional and social inequalities, while remaining one of the most populous and economically important countries of South America.