The Spanish conquest of New Granada refers to the conquest between 1525 and 1540 by the Spanish monarchy of the Chibchan-speaking nations of modern-day Colombia and Panama, mainly the Muisca and Tairona that inhabited present-day Colombia, beginning the Spanish colonization of the Americas. It is estimated that around 5.25 million people died as a result of Spanish Conquest, either by disease or direct conflict. This represents 87.5% of the Pre-Columbian population of Colombia.
The Crown of Castile was a medieval polity in the Iberian Peninsula that formed in 1230 as a result of the third and definitive union of the crowns and, some decades later, the parliaments of the kingdoms of Castile and León upon the accession of the then Castilian king, Ferdinand III, to the vacant Leonese throne. It continued to exist as a separate entity after the personal union in 1469 of the crowns of Castile and Aragon with the marriage of the Catholic Monarchs up to the promulgation of the Nueva Planta decrees by Philip V in 1716.
In 1492, the voyage of Christopher Columbus and the discovery of the Americas were major events in the history of Castile. The West Indies, Islands and Mainland of the Ocean Sea were also a part of the Crown of Castile when transformed from lordships to kingdoms of the heirs of Castile in 1506, with the Treaty of Villafáfila, and upon the death of Ferdinand the Catholic. The discovery of the Pacific Ocean, the conquest of the Aztec Empire, the conquest of the Inca Empire, the Spanish conquest of New Granada as well as the conquest of the Philippines all helped shape the Crown of Castile into a global empire in the 16th Century.
Indigenous peoples in Colombia (Spanish: Pueblos indígenas en Colombia), also known as Native Colombians (Spanish: Colombianos nativos), are the ethnic groups who have inhabited Colombia before the Spanish colonization of Colombia, in the early 16th century.
Estimates on the percentage of Colombians who are indigenous vary, from 3% or 1.5 million to 10% or 5 million. According to the 2018 Colombian census, they comprise 4.4% of the country's population, belonging to 115 different tribes, up from 3.4% in the 2005 Colombian census. However, a Latinobarómetro survey from the same year found that 10.4% of Colombian respondents self-identified as indigenous. The most recent estimation of the number of indigenous peoples of Colombia places it at around 9.5% of the population. This places that Colombia as having the seventh highest percentage of Indigenous peoples in the Americas with Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru, and Panama having a higher estimated percentage of Indigenous peoples than Colombia. The percentage of Indigenous peoples has been growing since an all-time low of 1965, where it was estimated only 1% of Colombians were indigenous.
The Muisca (also called the Chibcha) were a pre-Columbian culture and colonial communities of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense before the Spanish colonization of the Americas, whose customs lasted up the beginning of the 19th century and Colombian independence, and are indigenous peoples in Colombia in a process of cultural re-definition and revitalization. The Muisca spoke Muysccubun, a language of the Chibchan language family, also called Muysca and Mosca, which is part of an important revival effort. The first known contact with Europeans in the region was in 1537 during the Spanish conquest of New Granada.
In New Spain, Spanish clerics and civil officials had a major impact on the Muisca, attempting to Christianize and incorporate them into the Spanish Empire as subjects.