History of Santa Fé
Santa Fé was founded in 1558 by the Spanish captain Francisco Vázquez for the purpose of gold mining activities. Very little is known about its early days, the town remained rather insignificant and isolated up till the 1950′s when rebels tried to instigate a Cuba-like revolution in the area. Fortunately their revolution failed in its early stages.
At the time local peasants had all reasons to revolt since the town had become dominated by a few powerful families who controlled most of the resources in the valley. Contact with the outside world was severely limited due to the absence of any paved roads, which made it impossible to travel to the much bigger town of Santiago during most of the year.
The statue of Gallego at the town square
The situation started to change with the arrival of a Catholic priest from Colombia by the name of Jesús Héctor Gallego Herrera in 1967. Gallego began to organize the peasants into co-operations, thus bypassing the monopolies of the elites. By 1971 his popular peasant movement had grown well outside the bounderies of Santa Fé and Gallego was viewed as an adversary by the countries´ populist dicatator Torijiros. With the help of one of the local families Gallego was arrested one night and ‘disappeared’.
The victory was short lived: Santa Fé had been opened to the world and its residents could no longer be dominated. The cooperativa that Gallego had founded continues to function to this day, and produces amongst other thing the region’s well known Cerro Tute coffee.
