History

The Tairona were the dominant civilisation of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta from at least the 1st century AD. By the time Teyuna was founded around 800 AD, the Tairona had developed sophisticated hydraulic engineering — the city’s terraces are connected by drainage canals still functional after twelve centuries — and a social stratification visible in the varying sizes and positions of their circular buildings. At its height, Teyuna may have held a population of several thousand, serving as an administrative and ceremonial centre for the surrounding settlements. The Sierra Nevada’s ecological range — from Caribbean coast to permanent snowfields in under 50 kilometres — gave the Tairona access to every resource zone in their territory simultaneously.

Spanish colonisers made sustained attempts to subjugate the Sierra Nevada from the 1520s onwards. The Tairona resisted for nearly a century; the formal military campaigns of 1599–1601 under Governor Juan Guiral Velón effectively destroyed the coastal Tairona towns and forced survivors into the high mountain interior. Teyuna was abandoned as a settlement, though the Kogui — who identify as Tairona descendants — maintained awareness of the site’s location and continued to visit it ceremonially. The city entered Spanish colonial records only in fragmentary form as an unspecified highland settlement.

In 1972 a group of guaqueros (illegal grave robbers) known as the Sepúlveda family climbed a stone staircase in the upper Sierra Nevada and emerged onto the terrace complex. They looted the site for several years — gold objects and ceramics appeared in Bogotá’s black-market antiquities trade — before the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH) identified the source and began official excavation in 1975 under archaeologist Álvaro Soto Holguín. The site was opened to guided tours in the 1990s and has been managed jointly with indigenous authorities since the early 2000s.