Who ruled Bogotá?

Bogotá spreads across a high, flat basin in the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes, about 2,600 metres above sea level, against a wall of mountains crowned by the peaks of Monserrate and Guadalupe. The basin, the bed of an ancient lake, holds some of the most fertile farmland in northern South America, and it supported a dense indigenous population long before the Spanish arrived. Founded by conquistadors in 1538, the city was the capital of a Spanish viceroyalty and has been the capital of Colombia since independence.

People have lived on the savanna for a very long time: rock shelters at El Abra, north of the city, hold traces of human activity about 12,000 years old. By the time of the conquest the plateau belonged to the Muisca, Chibcha-speaking farmers who grew maize and potatoes, mined salt at Zipaquirá and Nemocón, and traded salt and cloth for gold, which their goldsmiths worked into offerings. Their southern ruler, the zipa, had his seat at Bacatá, near modern Funza, and the Spanish later adapted that name for their city. Ceremonies in which gold was offered at sacred lakes helped inspire the European legend of El Dorado.

An expedition led by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada climbed from the Caribbean coast up the Magdalena valley and reached the plateau in 1537 with only a fraction of the men who had set out. The Spaniards defeated the Muisca and in August 1538 founded Santa Fe at the foot of the mountains, near a Muisca village. Within months two other conquistador expeditions, from Peru and from Venezuela, arrived on the same plain, and the rival leaders sailed to Spain to settle their claims.

Santa Fe became the seat of a royal court, or audiencia, from 1550, and the capital of the New Kingdom of Granada within the Spanish Empire. For its first two centuries it answered to the Viceroyalty of Peru in Lima. In 1717, and definitively in 1739, the crown created the Viceroyalty of New Granada with its capital at Santa Fe, which became a city of churches, convents and colleges. A royal botanical expedition, based in the city from 1791, made it a centre of scientific learning.

On 20 July 1810, a quarrel over a borrowed flower vase gave local creoles the pretext to form a ruling junta, the event Colombians mark as their independence day. Spanish forces under Pablo Morillo reconquered the city in 1816 and executed many patriot leaders, but after his victory at Boyacá in August 1819 Simón Bolívar entered Bogotá in triumph, a decisive moment in the Spanish American wars of independence. The city became the capital of Gran Colombia and, after that union broke apart in 1830 and 1831, of New Granada, the state later renamed Colombia.

For much of the nineteenth century Bogotá remained remote, days of travel from the coast. Railways, trams and coffee wealth helped it grow in the early twentieth century. On 9 April 1948 the assassination of the popular Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán set off the riots known as the Bogotazo, which wrecked much of the centre, killed many people and opened the decade of civil strife called La Violencia. Rural violence in later decades drove millions of migrants to the city. In 1985 the guerrilla group M-19 seized the Palace of Justice, and nearly a hundred people died when the army stormed it.

From the 1990s reforming mayors invested in public space, libraries, cycle routes and the TransMilenio bus system. Bogotá today has nearly eight million people and is Colombia's largest city and its political and economic centre.