The uprising led by Benkos Biohó in the region of Cartagena de las Índias is regarded as one of the most significant examples of slave resistance in the Hispanic colonial world. Cartagena, as the main slave port of the Kingdom of Nueva Granada, concentrated a large population of slaves, either already serving their masters locally or in transit to different parts of Spanish America, a context that favoured collective escapes and the formation of maroon communities known as palenques. Domingo Benkos Biohó, an enslaved man from Bijagós (Guinea), likely arrived in Cartagena in 1596. In early 1600, maybe slightly earlier, Biohó led the escape of a group of thirty slaves who took refuge in a densely forested area (arcabuco), roughly 100 km south of Cartagena, near Tolú, where they founded the Palenque de La Matuna, strategically protected by marshlands and the Sierra de María. The failure of several expeditions by colonial troops and militias to suppress this maroon insurgency led to peace agreements between the rebels and the provincial governors concluded in 1605 and again in 1612/13. Biohó and his followers—by then maybe a few hundred—were granted recognition of the palenque’s autonomy, and other rights, in exchange for not harbouring new runaway slaves nor to raid settlers’ properties and roads. However, rumors of a plan, allegedly led by Biohó, for a massive uprising of slaves and maroons extending from Riohacha in the north to Zaragoza in the south, together with pressure from colonists and slave owners, prompted Governor García Girón to seize the leader during a visit to the capital and order his hanging on 16 March 1622. Although neither the first nor the last maroon resistance movement in the region, this uprising became the most prominent in Colombia’s historical memory.