page_title: Boyacá Department
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Boyacá Department / History
caption_attribution_description: Paso del ejército del Libertador por el Páramo de Pisba
context_page_description: Boyacá is one of the thirty-two departments of Colombia, and the remnant of Boyacá State, one of the original nine states of the "United States of Colombia".
  Boyacá is centrally located within Colombia, almost entirely within the mountains of the Eastern Cordillera to the border with Venezuela, although the western end of the department extends to the Magdalena River at the town of Puerto Boyacá. Boyacá borders to the north with the Department of Santander, to the northeast with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and Norte de Santander, to the east with the departments of Arauca and Casanare. To the south, Boyacá borders the department of Cundinamarca and to the west with the Department of Antioquia covering a total area of 23,189 square kilometres. The capital of Boyacá is the city of Tunja.
  Boyacá is known as "The Land of Freedom" because this region was the scene of a series of battles which led to Colombia's independence from Spain. The first one took place on 25 July 1819 in the Pantano de Vargas and the final and decisive battle known as the Battle of Boyacá was fought on 7 August 1819 at Puente de Boyacá.
context_section_description: The territory of present-day Boyaca was during the Pre-Columbian time the domain of the Muisca indigenous peoples. The Muisca under the chiefdom of the zaque of Hunza lived mainly by agriculture and mining gold and emeralds.
  The first European to discover the area was the Spaniard Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada who conquered the northern Muisca living in the area led by last zaque Aquiminzaque and distributed the land in encomiendas and forced the indigenous people to work for him.
  In 1539, Gonzalo Suárez Rendón, a Spanish conquistador, founded the city of Tunja and other sites where the indigenous people previously had their villages. Tunja became one of the main political and economic centers for the Spanish during the Viceroyalty of New Granada.
  During the 19th century, Boyacá 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. In 1824 Gran Colombia created the Boyacá Department (Gran Colombia).
  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.
caption: El Libertador Simón Bolívar crossing the Páramo de Pisba.
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