The quinto, or "royal fifth" collected by the Spanish Crown, was needed to finance the gigantic enterprise of conquest, as well as various wars fought by Spain in Europe.

In 1536, construction began on the Castillo de San Lázaro, a massive fortress with a series of masonry walls up to 20 meters thick, the most formidable defensive complex of Spanish military architecture to this day.

In 1538, the Crown authorized the encomienda in the colony; this was a social system that extracted forced labor and tribute from the Indians, whom it deemed "free vassals".

In the following years, the founder of the colony, Pedro de Heredia, was jailed for crimes against the native people of the Río Sinú valley, including stripping their tombs of the gold objects buried with their dead.

A guard system of zones divided the city into five districts: Santa Catalina, with the cathedral and many Andalusian-style palaces; Santo Toribio, inhabited by traders and the petty bourgeoisie; La Merced, where the headquarters of the fixed battalion was located; San Sebastián, a neighborhood of modest one-story houses, and finally, the suburb of Getsemani, a district of craftsmen and port workers.

In the early 19th century, a few white Criollos, e.g., locally born people of Spanish ancestry, were given a classical education, some of them in Santa Fe, and a few even in Europe, and had begun to excel in literature and the arts, as well as professions such as medicine, law and the natural sciences.

In the course of their studies, they had been exposed to liberal ideas of liberty and equality, and as they increasingly developed an identity as Hispanic Americans, they chafed at their secondary status in the Spanish colonial caste system to the Peninsulares, or Spanish-born Spaniards.

The final blow to bring down the royalist government, the coup de grace dreamed of by the patriots, would not be accomplished easily, as the city was a formidable base of Spanish power, and had entrenched political, military, religious and administrative bureaucracies.

The administrative apparatus of Cartagena was complex and difficult to penetrate, but the Criollos continued to conspire and form their plans while waiting for the expected moment to act.

In early May 1810, Antonio Villavicencio, a Criollo aristocrat born in Quito and brought up in Bogotá, arrived at Cartagena de Indias.

He wrote a letter to the Viceroy of New Granada explaining that one of the chief grievances of the criollo elites was that they felt virtually excluded from service in the state bureaucracy by the practical difficulty of travelling to Spain to secure an appointment.

[9] The city's criollo merchants wanted the freedom to trade with other countries besides Spain, and in response the junta opened the port to the ships of all nations.

Those in the Santa Marta region had built strongholds at Tenerife and Chiriguana on the Magdalena River, leading the revolutionaries of Cartagena to burn the towns.

With the defeat of Napoleon in 1814 and the return of Ferdinand VII to the throne, the Spanish authorities, at the behest of the king, decided to send troops to the Americas to reclaim the territories that had proclaimed themselves independent.

From the point of view of the criollos, the king was ignoring the loyalty the American provinces had shown when he was in exile in France, and now he was asserting his right to govern as an absolute ruler.

Soon thereafter news arrived in Cartagena of the landing of Gen. Pablo Morillo in Venezuela on March 27 with a detachment of 10,500 Spanish soldiers, sent to restore the rule of the viceroyalty.

[9] Morillo advanced to Cartagena, and on August 15 began a siege of the city that continued for three months, inflicting hunger, disease and high mortality on the insurgents.

These bodies of water supported various economic activities and were used for communication and trade with other regions, the Cauca and Magdalena rivers being of special significance,[25] with much of the goods produced by the interior of New Granada transported to Cartagena on them.

The table shows the data used by Calderón indicating the approximate population of the province at the time of each census in the New Kingdom of Granada, taken successively when new taxes were levied by the Spanish crown.