History of Nicoya

The Indian revolt of 1760-61

By the mid-18th century, or the middle phase of the colonial period, an uneasy balance of power and authority had evolved between different elements of colonial society in Nicoya and its surrounding hinterland. The Indian community of Nicoya persisted weakly as a shadow of its former self, maintained by a tradition of reciprocal ties of rights and obligations to patriarchal Crown authority. However, this tradition rested primarily on a crucial link, the Corregidor, and in late 1750s this tradition was turned on its head and Nicoya as an independent ethnic community began to unravel.

In 1756, Don Santiago Alfeiran was appointed Corregidor of Nicoya. A Spaniard, he had never set foot in Nicoya until he finally arrived to take his post in 1758. Traditional relations of obligation and exchange were quickly replaced by increasingly onerous demands on the community's productive capabilities, followed by exceptionally harsh physical abuse when those demands were not met. To give just one example, tribute in Nicoya was traditionally paid by one product that could be produced nowhere else in the region: cotton thread dyed purple with the secretion of a rare mollusk found on the Pacific Coast of the genus Murex. This dye had been exploited during pre-Columbian times, and the Nicoyans took great care not to kill the mollusk when extracting the dye. In order not to stress the animals, they only dyed cotton every three months. Alfeiran demanded a threefold increase in production, altering traditional forms of production that had been in effect at least since the early colonial period, if not extending into the pre-Columbian past. Multiple court cases related to Alfeiran's tenure attest to the fact that this was just one, and perhaps not the most