The creation of the Guambianos

the myth of the creation of the Guambianos that follows is taken from the first part of a story published on the site of the Colombian anthropologist Luis Guillermo Vasco. The creation of the Guambianos is as follows:

The creation myth of the Guambianos

The creation myth of the Guambianos


First was the land…and then came the lagoons, the big lagoons. The largest of these was that of Nupisu, Piendamo, in the middle of the savannah, of the moor, like a womb, like a heart; It is Nupirrapu, which is a very deep hole.

Water is life. First land and water. Water is neither good nor bad. That's where the good stuff and the bad stuff come from. There, in the heights, it was water. It was raining intensely, with torrential rains, showers, gusts, storms. The rivers became large, with huge landslides that swept away the mountains and brought stones like houses; there were great floods and floods.

It was bad water. At that time, these deep guaicadas (hollow between two mountains) and those rocks were not like that, as we see them today, all that was pure mountain, those rivers made them when they flowed down to form the sea. Water, that's life. It is born in the waters upstream and descends in the rivers to the sea. And it returns, but not by the rivers themselves, but by the air, by the clouds.

Climbing through the guaicadas and the mountain ridges, she reaches the páramo, the savannahs, and the rain falls again, the water falls, the good and the bad. There she arrives, like earth and water, she is he-she (The Pishimisak is the perfect unit, the perfect pair; it contains in its being the two principles, the masculine and the feminine, which together give multiplication; but, at the same time, it is formed of two characters: the pishimisak itself and the kallim).

It's the Pishimisak, masculine and feminine at the same time, which has always existed, all white, all good, all fresh. From the water was born the kosrompoto, the rainbow that illuminated everything with its light; there it shone, the Pishimisak saw him light up.

They bore much fruit, they gave much life. The water was in the desert. In the background the plants were drying up, the flowers were falling, the animals were dying. When the water came down everything grew and blossomed, all the grass grew and there was food here. It was good water.

Before, in the savannas of the páramo, the Pishimisak took all the meals, all the food. Everything belonged to him. He was already there when the landslides took place that dragged gigantic stones that formed the guaicadas. But there were other landslides. Sometimes the water was not born in the lagoons to run towards the sea, but filtered into the earth, stirred it up, loosened it and the landslides happened.

These collapsed centuries in advance, leaving great wounds in the mountains. From them came the humans who were the root of the natives. They called the collapse pirran uno, that is to say, to give birth to water.

The humans who were born there, they named them the Pishau. The Pishau came from landslides, they came from the flooding of rivers. Under the water, they came crawling and hitting the big stones, above them, the mud, the earth, then the dirty water; on the surface, the palisade, the branches, the leaves, the uprooted trees and, above all, the children, the chumbados, arrived.

The previous ones are born from the water, come in the shau, remnants of vegetation trailing and growing. They have been natives of here for centuries and centuries. Where the collapse occurred, in the great wound of the earth, there remained the smell of blood; it is the blood sprinkled by nature, just as a woman sprinkles blood when giving birth to a child.

The Pishau were not from other peoples, they were the same Guambianos, very wise giants who ate salt from here, our own salts, and who were not baptized. They occupied all our territory, they built all our Nupirau before the arrival of the Spaniards. Our land was large and very rich.

There were mines of very precious minerals, such as gold which was found in Chisquío, San José and Corrales, fine woods, fish, hill animals and many other resources that we knew how to use in our work to live well.

This was the creation myth of the Gambianos.