HISTORYWhat today is known as "Sout

HISTORYWhat today is known as "Southern Bolívar" was always a gold subregion even from the pre-Columbian period. As a result the gold from the graves found by the army of Pedro de Heredia (a Spanish conquistador) in Zenú territory came from the Zenufana mining region, located in the Bajo Cauca and Nechi, within the limits of the current departments of Antioquia, Bolivar and Cordoba. In the early seventeenth Fray Pedro Simon has knowledge of the gold mines in Simití and Guamocó, the latter located in the Serrania de San Lucas, between the rivers Magdalena and Cauca. Because of that, the city of San Francisco was founded in 1611 by Captain Juan Garavito Pérez. The increase in mining activity was necessary to construct a road between Simití and Guamocó in 1623 (Salcedo del Villar, 1987: 51).In the years 1787-1788, the Franciscan friar Joseph Palacios de la Vega had the mission to evangelize and to concentrate indigenous populations and the black fugitives scattered over the southern mountains of the Bolivar Department. In the area of Tiquisio, the friar found over one hundred families dedicated to small scale gold mining (Palacios, 1994: 129 and 133).In addition to gold mining and the cultivation of tobacco, other activities were developed in the south of Bolivar such as steam navigation and exploration of oil.In the early 1940's began some exploration and exploitation projects for oil in the district of Cantagallo-Simiti. These operators generate a more dynamic economy in the subregion, creating high expectations resulting in a small wave of migration to new populations oil.