San Basilio de Palenque is a small town in the interior of Colombia’s Caribbean region that has a unique cultural legacy of maintaining many African traditions, even boasting the only Spanish based Creole language still spoken today.

In recent years, it’s become a popular day trip from Cartagena as a result of the increased safety situation in the area coupled with an increased interest in Afro-Colombian history and contributions to Colombian society at large.

By they way, if you do want to visit San Basilio de Palenque, do check out my guide to visiting it here.

When writing that article, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole researching the history of San Basilio de Palenque. There were some discrepancies for dates of its founding in different sources online, so I started digging around to try to find a date I could confidently settle on.

What I learned down this rabbit hole actually surprised me and indicated a lot of the most commonly told stories about Palenque’s history are probably more myth than fact.

You will find a brief history as well as info on visiting the town in that link above, but here I’m going to dive in a little deeper into the history of the town and what I learned once I started digging into it. I will also briefly mention some ways to visit.

So, if you’d like to learn a bit more about San Basilio de Palenque history, including digging into these likely myths, read on in this in depth article on the history of San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia.

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History of Palenque – Contents

• Why Palenque Was Not the First Free Town in the Americas (but also sort of was)
• The Palenque Founding Myth
• The (Maybe) Truer Story of Palenque’s Founding
• Palenque’s Historic Legacy

By the way, if you want to visit the town, again please do check out that guide to visiting here, or you can book a private tour with my partner travel agency BnB Colombia Tours. Click this link to book a tour and use the code ExploreColombia10 to get a discount. You can also book tours to Palenque via GetYourGuide and Viator.

Why Palenque Was Not the First Free Town in the Americas

San Basilio de Palenque, also called Palenque de San Basilio or oftentimes just Palenque or Palenke, is often referred to as the “First Free Town in the Americas.”

So, there is an element of truth to that moniker, but I’ve always felt it was a bit disingenuous, even more so now that I’ve learned a bit more about the history of the town.

The town being called the first free town in the Americas stems from the fact that in 1714, the Spanish crown officially recognized it and granted amnesty and freedom to the town’s residents, most of them runaway slaves or the children of runaway slaves.

So, in a sense, yes it was the “First Free Town in the Americas,” at least in the sense it was the first to be officially recognized as a free space by a European monarch or slave holding power.

So, if we want to get technical, it was in fact the first de jure free town.

However, it was not the first colony of runaway slaves, often called maroons, or cimarrones in Spanish, in the Americas, nor was it the first in Colombia, for that matter.

The first maroon colonies are thought to have been established as early as the 1520s in the present day Dominican Republic.

The most commonly cited dates for the founding of San Basilio de Palenque are 1603 and 1619. Both of those dates are likely inaccurate, but we’ll examine that in more detail below.

Even using those dates, it wouldn’t be the first freed slave colony in this region of Colombia though.

As early as 1580 there are records of Spanish military expeditions from Cartagena against maroon colonies according to this study (in Spanish).

That article also cites sources in the 1630s that state there had been maroon colonies in the Montes de María region, where San Basilio de Palenque is located, for 70 years, so as early as the 1560s.

There were likely countless maroon communities dotted around Colombia’s interior Caribbean region by the turn of the 17th century. Cartagena was a major slave port, and the interior coastal regions south and southeast of it were largely uncolonized by the Spanish due to the unforgiving nature of the climate and terrain.

These enclaves of free slaves were often called “Palenques,” a Spanish word that means “walled city” or fortified place, because they often had wooden walls, and were under constant threat of attack by the Spanish colonial authorities.

There is also strong evidence there were many mixed communities of runaway slaves and indigenous peoples in this region of Colombia’s Caribbean throughout the colonial period. Aline Helg’s book Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia 1770-1835 is an interesting examination of these communities in the late colonial and early independence era (you can read my review of it here).

San Basilio was by far the most successful of the palenques long term in Colombia, and arguably anywhere in the Americas.

It’s also the only one to have survived continuously as a unique cultural space where traditions that can be traced back to Africa are maintained today.

However, it just wasn’t the first palenque or de facto free town to exist, and I feel that “First Free Town” nickname implies to most people it was.

At least inn my opinion, this diminishes the significance of the countless other communities that existed in this region and elsewhere in the Americas.

I think, for better or worse, we like to think of history as simpler than it was. We like to think this is the town of runaway slaves, all the runaway slaves lived here, and it survived as a special “city on a hill” kind of place when the reality is it was one of many and took on an even more important special significance after becoming an officially recognized safe haven where African traditions survived.

All that being said, I do get why it’s a good way to market the town as a tourist attraction, and if it draws more people, I’d say that’s on the whole a good thing.

Plus, it is still an extremely significant place deserving of the attention and interest it gets!

The Myth of Palenque’s Fouding

It turns out the “first free town” thing is not the only loose interpretation of history you’ll find related to San Basilio de Palenque’ history.

The most common telling of the town’s founding and early history is also most likely a myth. Let’s briefly go over this myth and then we’ll deconstruct it below.

According to the legend, which is what most guides will mostly likely say and what most sources online say, San Basilio de Palenque was founded sometime in the early 1600s. Most sources date the town’s founding to 1603 and a few others say 1619.

In this telling, the town was founded by a group of around 30 escaped slaves from Cartagena. The leader of this group was Benkos Biohó, who may have been a former African king or tribal leader according to some versions of the story.

There is a statue of Biohó breaking free form his chains in the town today with the year 1603 marked on it.

Following this common telling of San Basilio de Palenque’s history, the town was so successful resisting the Spanish that the crown was ultimately compelled to grant the city recognition in a peace treaty.

This peace treaty led to its status as a free town, but not before Biohó was killed in a double cross by the Spanish under a flag of truce.

Then there is sort of a gap in most tellings of this story that says later the Spanish recognized the town. Dates for that recognition vary widely in sources online, but most cite the 1690s or 1710s.

Variations of the story of Biohó’s death also exist.

Some suggest he was killed during the negotiations with the Spanish.

Others suggest he was killed after a peace agreement with the Spanish luring him into a trap. That was the story I had been told and would have included here had I not dug into researching after noticing the discrepancies in dates.

If we set aside these smaller discrepancies, the broad strokes of this common founding story are as follows: Biohó founded Palenque, was killed, but not before he and the community scared the Spanish enough so that they negotiated a peace that saw the community recognized as a free space.

What I Found When Researching Palenque’s History

So, while that story seems to contain a fair amount of mythology, it also isn’t really that far from the truth either.

Alongside the growth of tourist interest in the town, there has also been a growth of academic interest and research on it in the last few decades. A lot of it, probably rightly, centers on the language and preservation of African cultural traditions, but there has also been work on the town’s history.

A lot of it is in Spanish and completed by Colombians with a few international academics as well. A lot of it is also behind paywalls or university log ins. There is one book, called San Basilio de Palenque: memoria y tradición, that I’m going to try to track down next time I’m in Colombia.

That book and its author is cited a number of times in this article in Spanish that’s my main source on the founding of Palenque. It has a really interesting and thorough examination of different palenques founded in this era. If you can access JStor, there’s a good article here with a summary I’m using as another of my main sources. It also examines some of the more recent history and challenge facing the town with increased tourism.

I’m going to split this examination up into a few sections, starting with Biohó and then the establishment of what became San Basilio de Palenque.

Benkos Biohó’s Insurrection and Free Town

In the founding myth of the history of Palenque, Benkos Biohó is pretty much universally accepted as the founder of the town. However, based on my research that appears to be much more legend and myth than fact.

Those sources I mentioned above suggest Biohó did not found San Basilio de Palenque in 1603. In fact, it suggests, he didn’t found it at all, and that the town was not founded until much later.

However, there is evidence that a slave named Domingo Biohó along with his wife and a few others did lead a small slave insurrection in Cartagena in either late 1599 or early 1600.

With around 30 people, they escaped and founded a free community. According to this article on Medium in English, it may have been Biohó’s fourth attempt at escape.

This community was located about twenty leagues south of Cartagena near the small colonial settlement of La Villa de Santiago de Tolú (commonly just called Tolú today and popular as a jumping off spot to visit the pretty San Bernardo Islands).

Biohó’s community was probably located not far from the modern city of Sincelejo. (There is a nice map on page 76/16 of the document in this article).

This area is southwest of the Montes de María and location of San Basilio today.

At least in Spanish colonial sources, this town was called the Palenque de Matuna, for its location near the Matuna Swamps. Evidence shows that in 1605, this community successfully resisted an attempt to destroy it by Spanish colonial authorities, and seems to have at least received a sort of de facto or tacit recognition by those authorities.

King Benkos

Biohó seems to have emerged as sort of a living legend after this, with that source above referring to him as the “caudillo” of the various palenques and maroon colonies that were scattered around the hinterlands outside of Cartagena.

It is around this time that he appeared to have possibly earned the title King Benkos Biohó, a testament to the recognition of his importance and leadership by the maroons and the Spanish authorities.

It’s unclear in my research if the claim that he was an African king is true. Some sources online such as this one claim he came from present day Guinea-Bissau, although that would contradict the likely origin of most of San Basilio Palenque’s residents in the modern day Congo based on the language. But, then again, we’ve already established that Biohó was almost assuredly not the founder of San Basilio, so it’s possible he did come from an area further north. It’s another issue I’d like to investigate more.

I would also say there’s a lot of ways you could interpret that title of king. It seems exceedingly unlikely in my view he was the king of some large kingdom or empire as I think the claim seems to evoke in our imaginations. If that was the case there it seems most likely we would have other records of it.

It is very possible, however, that he was an important tribal or clan leader or perhaps the descendant of one since he displayed strong leadership skills and was recognized as a significant person by the various palenques.

Regardless of his birth status, Biohó was by far the most important leader of fugitive slaves in the area, and it’s clear he played a role in coordinating cooperation between them and successfully promoting the communities’ defense.

Their success inspired more runaways to join them or create their own palenques. There’s also evidence they led raids to free more slaves themselves. It’s possible his capture and execution may have been during one such raid.

Biohó’s Death

I haven’t been able to find one version of Biohó’s death I’m satisfied with as being completely reliable.

This source, that has a ton of detail on the community glosses over it as him being killed by guards, possibly in Cartagena, in 1618 or 1619.

However, this one, suggests he was assassinated in an altercation with guards in 1621 but then contradicts itself and says he was tried for insurrection and hanged and quartered.

I’m going to keep trying to see what I can find in other sources and update if I find something more convincing. However, for the time being, it’s clear Biohó was killed sometime between 1618 and 1621, likely after some type of confrontation with authorities. It’s possible he was killed on the spot and also possible he was captured and executed later, perhaps after a trial, perhaps with no trial.

While his death was likely a setback for the maroons, his legacy continued to inspire a spirit of active resistance by the various palenques.

Palenque de San Miguel Arcángel – Precursor to San Basilio

The area of the Montes de María where San Basilio is located had by this time become the home of a number of different palenques. There is evidence they had trade between them and some level of economic, social, and political integration.

There is even evidence, they had some trade and economic relations with white settlements, an indication they existed in a sort of legal gray area with a sort of de facto recognition of their sovereignty, even if in name they were still in illegal rebellion.

Despite this evidence there was at least some unofficial relations between the palenques and white settlers, throughout the 1600s, there were still numerous military expeditions by Spanish colonial authorities to seek and destroy the various palenques.

Some of these expeditions were successful in destroying specific communities, others were largely failures. They most certainly failed to wipe out the palenques entirely, and when they did destroy communities, residents rebuilt them, built new ones, or joined with other communities.

It’s funny how history seems to work in cycles. There was basically 100 years of low intensity conflict between the palenques and the colonial authorities, probably with periods of peace interspersed with periods of greater conflict. This has a lot in common with Colombia’s modern internal conflict albeit with mostly very different causes (although there’s an interesting discussion that could be had there).

That potential other rabbit hole aside, let’s turn to the town that became San Basilio de Palenque.

Between 1655 and 1674 the Palenque de San Miguel Arcángel was founded in the Montes de María.

It was reportedly founded by Domingo Criollo, and likely was made up of a combination of maroons that had crossed over from the other side of the Magdalena River and survivors from several palenques that were destroyed around the same time.

It quickly grew in importance and size, and became a target of colonial authorities. After several expeditions, it was destroyed by the Spanish in 1694.

However, residents and new runaways returned and rebuilt. By the first years of the 1700s, the town appeared to be thriving once again.

Legal Recognition

Around this period, there seemed to be a recognition by the Spanish that they were essentially caught in an ultimately futile and never ending cycle of seek and destroy missions against the palenques. This would have been a drain on resources at best, and at worst could lead to larger insurrections.

Cartagena’s governor decided to negotiate.

In late November 1713, the military commander in a new expedition, demanded the Palenque de San Miguel Arcángel negotiate before he attacked. Representatives of the town went to Cartagena in early December and met with Antonio María Cassiani, the city’s bishop, to negotiate a possible peace treaty.

On December 22, 1714, a formal agreement was drafted.

All the maroons in the Palenque of San Miguel Arcángel would be pardoned, granted their freedom, and open commerce would be established between them and the Spanish.

On January 17, 1714 Cassiani traveled to the town and oversaw the formal agreement to the treaty with the town’s leader Nicolás de Santa Rosa.

The same day, a church was built, and a priest from the order of San Basilio was named parish priest. Therefore, the community’s name was changed to San Basilio Magno. While it was technically now a formal part of the Spanish empire as a town recognized by the crown, in practice the town was more or less autonomous.

Overtime, it became known as San Basilio de Palenque or Palenque de San Basilio.

As other palenques were either destroyed or their residents either moved here or to other communities where they assimilated into Spanish and later Colombian communities, the town eventually was often just referred to as Palenque as it is today.

Myth vs Facts (?)

So, while I’ve now spent a lot of time deconstructing the most common story of the history of Palenque, there are a couple things I think are worth pointing out.

First, the complete true story is elusive at best, and perhaps outright impossible to confirm entirely. The sources I’ve found that give other dates for its founding and other information on Biohó’s story I imagine are largely based on Spanish records preserved in Cartagena.

Records of military expeditions and royal officials’ writings on these communities probably also should not be taken at complete face value.

Second, and most importantly, this apparently more accurate story does not really invalidate the founding myth of Palenque.

I feel it’s safe to conclude that Biohó did not found the town.

However, the general contours of a story where Biohó did lead fugitive slave communities and inspired continued resistance during and after his life all are true.

In this sense, Biohó may not have literally founded the town in 1603, but still makes sense to be seen as a spiritual founder of the town not only as a way to pay homage to this important precursor but also to recognize that the town very much is, in fact, the culmination of his work and legacy.

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of great information on the town’s history after 1714, but I’ll try in the next section to trace what I was able to learn about this period.

Preserving Traditions

It’s not entirely clear how many people were living in the town at the time of its recognition, but a 1777 census indicates it was just over 600 people.

According to this study published in 2016, (available on JStor), genetic evidence suggests many of the residents may be able to trace their roots back to the Yombe people of West Africa. This largely agrees with oral traditions in the community that they can trace their origins to the Congo, which as noted above is considerably south of Biohó’s supposed origins in Guinea-Bissau.

The Palenquero language, the only known Spanish based creole language that remains in existence today, is also believed to have around 200 words of clear origins in the Kikongo family of languages, with Yombe also thought to be the most similar and likely ancestor.

Given the history we’ve examined here though, it’s hard to conclude if the town was founded by a group or groups of Yombe people seeking out a separate space or if Yombe was simply the most common ethnic group brought to Cartagena around the time of or shortly before its founding and therefore would by extension be more prevalent in residents’ DNA.

Regardless, it’s clear many West African practices survived here even to the present day.

The combination of the town’s strong cultural identity, its geographical isolation, its largely subsistence economy of small scale farming and ranching, and its marginalization and neglect by official authorities meant many traditional practices, rituals, and beliefs, in addition to the language, were maintained here into the 20th century and remain practiced by many residents into the 21st.

Among those are practices of traditional shamanistic medicine, funeral and burial rituals, and forms of social organization, such as the kuagro groups that link people of different ages with group responsibilities and duties.

As noted above, I haven’t been able to find much information on the town’s history between the 1700s and the present day.

As the area around it became increasingly settled in the 1800s, it’s possible the residents were forced to modify some aspects of their daily lives and likely faced issues over ownership of surrounding land.

The entire Montes de María region was subject to violence in the late 20th century as part of Colombia’s internal conflict. While some of the communities nearby were subject to massacres and extreme violence, Palenque seems to have escaped the worse of it.

Still, there’s testimony that many residents did face threats and extortion. Given the nature of the conflict in general, it seems almost certain they were forced to alter their use of surrounding land and fields due to armed groups operating nearby or outright theft of the land as well.

These effects of the conflict along with poverty in the town led to many younger residents migrating or dreaming of migrating to Cartagena or elsewhere in Colombia or even abroad.

By the close of the 20th century, there were fears many of the traditions that had survived in Palenque would be lost.

Due partly to fears of being subject to discrimination and racist stereotypes towards the community, and really their Afro-Colombianess in general, many of them were also were not interested in learning and speaking the language or maintaining traditional practices. There was also likely a fairly normal young people rejection of their elders’ tradition at play as well.

At the same time, many village elders were dying out.

Luckily, the town’s recognition as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005 brought it increased attention to those traditions as well as affirmed and further kindled the efforts of those already hard to work to preserve it.

What were once points of potential ridicule or embarrassment have become points of pride.

Cartagena’s Palenqueras and Palenque Today

Women from the community, known as palenqueras at some point began traveling to Cartagena to sell fruit and homemade sweets such as cocadas. I can’t find any source that discusses when they became common sights in the city, but I’d imagine it could be as early as the 1930s when tourism began to come to the city.

It seems likely that residents traveling the Cartagena to sell fruits or other agricultural products probably dates to much earlier as well.

Regardless of when exactly they began making the trek to Cartagena, the women from Palenque who did so to sell fruit and sweets eventually became known for their colorful dresses that pay homage to their African roots. Today, these dresses usually consist of either the red, yellow, and blue of Colombia’s national flag or the red, blue, and green of Cartagena’s flag.

In more recent years as tourism has grown, taking photos with palenqueras has become at least as popular and probably more popular than buying fruit from them.

Their emergence as an iconic image of Cartagena, flashed on travel ads, blogs, and Instagram feeds around the world is one factor that helped increase interest in the community.

A visit to San Basilio is now routinely included on lists of things to do and see in Cartagena and Colombia What was a rarity even just 15 or so years ago is now one of the most popular tours in Cartagena and best day trips from Cartagena.

As mentioned above, if you’d like to visit Palenque, you can book here with my partner agency BnB Colombia. They’ll give you a discount if you use the code ExploreColombia10. GetYourGuide and Viator also both sell tours to Palenque as well as many other agencies and guides operating in Cartagena.

Of course, increased tourism brings both opportunities and challenges for the community.

This article, cited elsewhere above and available via JStor, though slightly dated, devotes most of its latter half to the challenges tourism is bringing to the community. Among these are ensuring tourist income properly benefits the community at large and maintaining the community’s authenticity while avoiding it being seen simply as an exotic oddity.

While it’s hard to be sure of the lasting effects of tourism on the community, it seems surely to have at least contributed to the history of San Basilio de Palenque being further researched and preserved. I’m hopeful the community can properly manage the less savory effects of tourism.

I also hope you found this article on the history of San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia interesting. As I said, when I started putting together a visitor guide (this site is a Cartagena tourist blog after all), I found the largely untold story of the town’s history not only contradictory to the conventional story I had heard but also really fascinating. The history major inside got the better of me and rather than only include a short summary there, I wanted to split this out into a separate, larger article exploring it in more depth.

I hope you found it as fascinating as I did!

Cheers and Happy Exploring!

Did you like this post on the history of San Basilio de Palenque?

If you’re planning a trip to Cartagena and enjoy history, I can’t recommend visiting the Naval Museum and the hidden gem forts of Bocachica enough. Of course, that’s in addition to the much better known Castillo San Felipe Fort.

If you want to learn more about San Basilio de Palenque’s history specifically, here are a few of the sources I used to help me put together this article, which are also linked above. This article on JStor is about the town’s general history, but it does the differing narratives of its founding that are discussed in more depth in this article in Spanish. That article heavily references this book that I don’t have currently but hope to get one day.

If you want to learn more about race and the history of Colombia’s Caribbean region, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia 1777-1835 is a fairly interesting read (read my review here). A book titled Myths of Harmony I came across while researching for this has also been added to my list of books I want to read someday. Finally, No Limits to their Sway, the story of Cartagena’s independence era privateers, who were former slaves is my favorite book on Cartagena’s history (read my review of it here).

And, I do have posts on the history of Cartagena more generally, I’d love for you to check out. There’s an indepth version and a shorter version.