*3.2.2 Occupation of spaces in the Colombian high Andean mountains and the use of forests, consolidation of a peasant economy*

The areas of the greatest presence of the forests of the high equatorial mountains correspond to the Cauca-Nariño mountain massif, better known as the Colombian Massif, where several of the main rivers of Colombia are born, such as the Cauca and the Magdalena, which in turn constitute the Magdalena-Cauca hydrological system, the most important for the development of the Colombian territory; there is also born the Patía River that drains toward the slope of the Choco Biogeográfico; and the Caquetá and Putumayo rivers that go to the Amazon region.

These spaces were occupied for millennia by peoples who possibly, for the most part, came from the Caribbean, who would constitute the ancestral indigenous peoples and in the most recent centuries by the Afro-descendant peoples who arrived in Colombian territory as a result of slavery during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.

With the Hispanic occupation, a new indigenous mestizo-Hispanic peasant was consolidated in the areas of the high equatorial mountain, which with different degrees of intensity has populated the high mountains of the former departments of Caldas, Antioquia, Valle del Cauca, in the Western and Central mountain ranges and the highlands of Cundiboyacense and Santander in the Eastern mountain range of Colombia. It should be noted that, during the second half of the nineteenth century, German migration arrived in Colombia, which was located in part of the mountains of Santander and Boyacá and Arab immigration in part of the Antioquia mountain, contributing to enrich the variety of peasant miscegenations.

This process of occupation was accompanied by the use of countless species for the manufacture of utensils such as baskets, backpacks, crafts, sieves, and other objects to facilitate the daily work of the people, who collected the indigenous heritage and perfected it for centuries with the skill of the artisans, who in each subregion were and still are elements of cultural identity in Antioquia. the Coffee Axis, Boyacá, Santander, Tolima, Cauca and Nariño. Species such as the enennillo (Wenmania tomentosa) was used until well into the 1960s to extract from its bark substances for tanning hides and countless vines and pastures for crafts.
