[2] Pascual de Andagoya, who in 1540, explored the area south of Bahía La Cruz - today Buenaventura - was the first European to report a "dense indigenous population" with large houses supported by stilts - called Barbacoas (Spanish for BBQ) by the Spanish - , especially in the vicinity of the Patía River Delta.

In 1634, when the Spanish discovered the rich gold deposits in the region, they named Timbiquí both the river and its basin and the entire district, which extended to the Cove of Tumaco, to the south.

The indigenous populations of the area were forced to work on the extraction of the gold from the rivers until the end of the XVII century, when they become almost extinct and were replaced by African slave labor.

However, inter-ethnic solidarity gradually developed between africans and indigenous forming maroon societies in the XVIII and XIX centuries to escape forced labor.

Indigenous and blacks survived the adverse rainforest environment by combining their strategies of subsistence which included slash-mulch cultivation, silviculture, hunting, gold and timber extraction, harvesting mangroves, and fishing.

In the 1920s, taking advantage of government malfeasance, overlapping legislations, and violent territorial control Interest in the region’s the New Timbiquí Gold Mines acquired property rights over large tracts of government-defined fallow land, landlocking the communities and forcing them to obtain special permissions to live on ancestral lands, forbidding traditional mining methods.

The region is classified according to its plant formations as Very Humid Tropical Forest (vhtf) with mangrove vegetation predominating in the brackish swamp area; The average annual rainfall varies between 4,000 and 8,000 mm.

and average temperatures of 29 C. The eastern part of the region has an undulating and mountainous topography due to the rise of the Western Cordillera, whose heights reach 3,000 meters above sea level.