Questions: Did an urban structure exist before the arrival of Spanish colonizers? What is the history of Indigenous urban design and environmental shaping in the metropolitan region of Bogotá? What are the impacts of colonialism on Bogotá’s urban and natural environments?
Bogotá sits on the southern end of an altiplano, a high savannah flanked by mountain peaks and crisscrossed by rivers and tributaries. The combination of the seasonal rains, mountain runoff, largely stable year-round temperatures, and volcanic soil makes the altiplano a fertile location for settlements with a large and sedentary population. Before the arrival of the Spanish to the area, this was what existed in the altiplano: a highly populated savannah with complex infrastructure and several population centers dotted across the wetlands of the savannah. Utilizing various disciplines and research methods such as the archeological study of the pre-colonial hydraulic systems that made the altiplano manageable for intensive agriculture, the history of transition and change through the Spanish colonization, the creation of the colonial capital of the viceroyalty of New Granada, the subsequent erasure of the waterways around the colonial city in the republican period can be explored to examine the contemporary consequences of the erasure of pre-colonial hydraulic systems in the altiplano.
The altiplano Cundiboyacense covers an area of 9,700 square miles (25,000 square kilometers) with a north to south downward slope surrounded by mountain peaks of the Colombian Andes. The high altitude of the altiplano makes the region cold, while the location of the altiplano makes it prone to rains, trapped by the mountains around the whole region. These geographical and climate conditions, along with the volcanic soils found there, make the altiplano Cundiboyacense, in theory, an ideal place for agriculture. However, the fertility of the altiplano is counteracted by the constant flow of water, making the southern portion of the altiplano a swampy wetland where large amounts of crops cannot thrive. With the wetlands tamed, the Chibcha of the altiplano were able to grow corn, potatoes, sweet manioc, and beans (Rodríguez Gallo 2019, 210. Broadbent 1968, 141-142.) This is the environment the Chibcha, or Muisca, people found. The Chibcha people share a common ancestry and language with several other Indigenous peoples of southern Central America and northern South America. Their metallurgy is the most extensive record of their existence. A museum in Bogotá is dedicated to displaying the many thousands of gold artifacts found in the twentieth century that the Spanish conquest did not plunder centuries before (Gold Museum—https://www.banrepcultural.org/bogota/museo-del-oro.) However, the legacy of the Chibcha of the altiplano Cundiboyacense extends beyond the gold artifacts in the Museo del Oro.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, archaeologists and anthropologists began investigating the outskirts of Bogotá, looking for evidence of the Muiscas recorded by sixteenth-century colonial sources. In the 1960s, anthropologist Sylvia Marguerite Broadbent wrote “A Prehistoric Field System in Chibcha Territory, Colombia,” detailing the archaeological finds of a particular field in the outskirts of Bogotá. Broadbent’s article creates a compelling argument for using both aerial photography and fieldwork to reconstruct the pre-colonial settlements of the Sabana de Bogotá- an area named Bacatá by the Chibcha people (Broadbent 1968, 135-136.) This article helps recreate the hydraulic infrastructure created by the Chibcha in the centuries before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers. The contribution of this article falls into the beginning of a discussion around the various usages of land in the pre-colonial period and the abandonment of the infrastructure the Chibcha built, particularly in the farming of various crops in wetlands visible in the mid-1960s (Broadbent 1968, 143.) The ground investigated by this article represents a small area of the cultivated and settled territory of the southern portion of the altiplano, but Broadbent states that in the future, there could be more accurate estimates about the size of the population (Broadbent 1968, 142-143.)
Contemporary research into the hydraulic systems utilizes the combination of sources Broadbent hoped could create a better understanding of the Chibcha before colonization. The work of archeologist Dr. Lorena Rodríguez Gallo aims to investigate the construction of hydraulic infrastructure and the Chibcha’s land management (Rodríguez Gallo 2019, 194.) Rodríguez Gallo’s “La Construcción Del Paisaje Agrícola Prehispánico En Los Andes Colombianos: El Caso de La Sabana de Bogotá” utilizes environmental surveys, archeology, and aerial photographs to reconstruct images of the many canals, irrigation ditches, and overflow ditches built by the Chibcha. The creation of these various hydraulic infrastructures allowed the area’s population to expand, with estimates of the number of inhabitants of the southern altiplano/savannah in the hundreds of thousands (Rodríguez Gallo 2019, 197-199.) Rodríguez Gallo’s exploration of this population details a system of nuclear settlements, with towns and villages dotting a landscape filled with farms, which were only possible after the redirection of the rivers and tributaries flowing down the slopes of the surrounding mountains (Rodríguez Gallo 2019, 197.) The intricate system of hydraulic infrastructure, argues Rodríguez Gallo, was possible through the political organization of the Chibcha. The Chibcha created a confederation that provided organization needed y to construct infrastructure and maintain the existing structures that maximized the fertility of the southern altiplano (Rodríguez Gallo 2019, 196-199.) With higher agricultural output, the communities that began to build the hydraulic infrastructure increased in size, creating a densely populated region with many permanent urban centers scattered throughout the savannah. Many of these settlements were subsequently converted to Spanish colonial towns and administrative centers, often retaining a form of their original names, such as Suba. Others morphed from the Chibcha language to Spanish, such as Bogotá (derived from Bacatá.) This system left a permanent imprint on the landscape of the savannah, with the redirected rivers and innumerable canals and drained remaining visible after the collapse of the Chibcha Confederation following colonization.
Colonization marked a transitional period for the urban sprawl created by the Chibcha. The population growth of the previous centuries collapsed in the face of diseases, colonization, and enslavement at the hands of the Spanish, leading to a complete abandonment of the hydraulic infrastructure of the southern portion of the altiplano (Rodríguez Gallo 2019, 202-204; Broadbent 1968, 139). The sharp decline in population and the divergent priorities of the colonial administration of the region decreased the demand for foodstuffs to be grown in the area. Without the Chibcha population, the expertise to build and maintain the hydrologic infrastructure disappeared, leading the Spanish settlement of the region to focus on the very bottom edges of the surrounding mountains. The contemporary colonial center of Bogotá is a clear example of the Spanish abandonment of the tamed wetlands, as the entire colonial district sits on top of a sloping hill away from mountain runoff and uphill from the main river of the area, the Bogotá River (Rodríguez Gallo 2019, 210-211.) Spanish colonization followed a pattern of population consolidation, making all surviving Indigenous people within their new empire move away from scattered settlements and towns to the new settlements where their labor and tribute could be collected more effectively. These processes allowed for the abandonment of Bacatá’s hydraulic infrastructure, which would eventually be overcome by local plants and the constant flow of water (Broadbent 1968, 139.) With the onset of colonization, the management of land in the altiplano changed. Lorena Rodríguez Gallo’s “Permanencias y transformaciones: el territorio muisca en la Sabana de Bogotá en la segunda mitad del siglo XVI” discusses the transition of the agricultural land management around Bogotá from the Chibcha, focused on the control of water in order to grow corn and tubers, to that of the Spanish, focused on cattle ranching and the growing of cereals (Rodríguez Gallo 2021, 375-377.) Rodríguez Gallo asserts that the early success of Spanish agriculture is due to the Chibcha’s infrastructure that survived the first decades of neglect in the late sixteenth century (Rodríguez Gallo 2021, 394-395.) Of particular note is the success of the Spanish cattle economy that took over the altiplano. Rodríguez Gallo argues that the success of the Spanish cattle came as the Spanish allowed the altiplano to flood as it had before the Chibcha constructed the hydraulic system, creating freshly flooded grassland for cattle to feed on (Rodríguez Gallo 2021, 394-395.) Rodríguez Gallo’s article shows that the abandonment of the hydraulic infrastructure did not occur as a simple decision based on lost manual labor due to population decreases or lost knowledge but as a deliberate form of expanding the agricultural economic systems preferred by the Spanish. As the new colonial administration of the region became politically influential, the city of Bogotá would eventually claim the seat of the new republican government of an independent Colombia. This position, however, did not cause the population of the city to expand as much as other colonial capitals that turned into national capitals such as Lima or Mexico City; the population of the region would not come near the same numbers as the pre-colonial era until the first decades of the twentieth century. The hydraulic infrastructure that maintained so many thousands of inhabitants would remain abandoned in the republican period, with the region’s natural waterways following in their disappearing footsteps in the eyes and minds of urban planners.
Following the independence of Colombia in the early nineteenth century, city planning and cartography would continue the tradition of leaving the surrounding waterways and wetlands out of Bogotá. Maps of the region drawn in the decades before and after independence display a shifting mentality regarding the importance of the wetlands surrounding Bogotá. Stefania Gallini’s and Carolina Castro Osorio’s “Modernity and the Silencing of nature in Nineteenth-Century Maps of Bogotá.” seeks to illustrate these changing mentalities by utilizing maps created in 1797, 1853, 1891, and 1894 (Gallini and Castro Osorio 2015, 98-101, 103-104, 107-112.) Before the republic, Spanish cartographers created maps detailing the bodies of water outside the colonial center, emphasizing the rivers’ flow and the seasonal floods that would cover the wetlands outside the city (Gallini and Castro Osorio 2015, 92, 113-114.) Gallini and Castro Osorio provide another example of the changing priorities of the city in the maps dated 1797 and 1853. The map dated 1853 is supposed to be a duplicate copy of the 1797 map. As Gallini and Castro Osorio point out, the two maps are very different, particularly in the detailing of the waterways outside Bogotá, which are very prevalent and detailed in the 1797 map, while the 1853 map includes them with light shading and little detail (Gallini and Castro Osorio 2015, 97-103.)
Following independence, the region’s cartography changed, leaving out not just the wetlands but also the rivers that provided fresh water to the city itself, creating a new mentality of modern urbanism without the immense nature and ecosystem still visible today. The erasure of the nature around the city followed in the footsteps left by the erasure of the Chibcha’s architecture and command of the wetlands, leaving a gap in the expansion of Bogotá that causes issues today. As Bogotá did not expand beyond the hillside of the western mountains until the twentieth century, flooding within densely populated areas was not a concern the city planners had. Germán Andrade’s “Assembling the Pieces: a Framework for the Integration of Multi-Functional Ecological Main Structure in the Emerging Urban Region of Bogotá, Colombia” discusses the city planning behind the disconnect between the flood-prone regions of the city and the history of the region. Andrade asserts that the embrace of Ecological Main Structure (EMS) and the prevalence of informal settlements (i.e., neighborhoods built without city planners and utilities) that are integrated into the city have contributed to the flooding issues facing Bogotá today (Andrade 2013, 726.) EMS, which calls for an integration of natural green spaces into urban landscapes, serves as an issue for flooding due to the early embrace of city planners in Bogotá (Andrade 2013, 724-726.) The early embrace of EMS led to a muddied vision of the future of Bogotá, which city planners aimed to be full of greenspaces only to be splashed by flooding (Andrade 2013, 726.) Lastly, Andrade includes the prevalence of informal settlements as another cause of flooding. Andrade asserts the construction of informal neighborhoods created a disjointed city growth process without a centralized or functioning plan for flooding, an issue made worse by the city’s land management policies that allowed the construction of informal settlements in the swampy outskirts of the city rather than the dry hillsides (Andrade 2013, 726.) Lastly, Bogotá’s layout is attached to the mountains, with a ~40km north-to-south length and west-to-east width of ~22km, which displays the constraints created by the flooding that occurs away from the foothills of the mountains. The modern city of Bogotá does not follow the same urban expansion as the Chibcha’s population centers, which dotted the entire wetlands, regardless of flooding or distance from elevation.
The Chibcha’s hydraulic infrastructure allowed for the creation of a different form of urban expansion than that of concentrated city centers seen in other parts of the world. By adapting and transforming the land of the altiplano, the region’s population numbered in the hundreds of thousands, numbers not seen after colonization until the twentieth century. With dense and numerous urban centers, the Chibcha created a confederated polity of multiple cities and towns surrounded by productive fields. The abandoning of hydraulic infrastructure, followed by a population collapse, led the urbanism of the Chibchas to be ditched in favor of colonial consolidation, allowing nature to reclaim the wetlands and creating flooding problems for the contemporary super metropolis of Bogotá.
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