Where today is the city of MedellínBefore the arrival of the Spanish, the lands were inhabited by indigenous Yamesíes, Niquías, Nutables and Aburraes. They had large crops of corn and beans, they raised curies, weaved cotton blankets, and sold salt and some gold and silver work.

In the year 1541, the first Spanish expedition led by Marshal Jorge Robledo arrived in these lands, and then, on March 2, 1616, in the place where El Poblado Park is located today, the city of Medellín was officially founded. , which originally adopted the name of San Lorenzo de Aburrá.

Years later they settled at the intersection formed by the Aburrá river and the Santa Elena ravine and built a church of walls and tiles which they called Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria, the same one that is standing today, but with many renovations, in front from the Parque Berrío station of the Medellín Metro.

During colonial times Medellín did not have much importance as an urban center; at that time the capital of the region was nearby Santa Fe de Antioquia. Medellín was just a quiet town surrounded by herds of no great importance.

Then, with the passage of time, the valley, and especially Medellín, went from being a simple station on the commercial routes that came from the provincial capital, to becoming the new political and economic center of the region.

The president Juan del Corral declared Medellín a city in 1813, motivated by the commercial importance that the city had acquired at that time, and the city became the capital of Antioquia on April 7, 1826, after independence from the Spanish.

During the first fifty years of the XNUMXth century, Medellín became a center of political and economic power. It was then that the great entrepreneurial spirit of the Antioquia people was fully expressed, and equally that of an economic society without the large estates that characterized the development of the other regions of the country.

Thus, the region became the industrial, economic and financial hub of the nation.

Medellín is called as it is called by the pure insistence of Don Pedro Portocarrero y Luna, count of Medellín, a town in the Extremadura region, in southern Spain.

Santa Fe de Antioquia, once capital of the region