San Basilio de Palenque is a small town near Cartagena, Colombia, founded by runaway slaves. At the end of the sixteenth century, African slaves started to escape from the coastal city of Cartagena to take refuge in the nearby region of Montes de María, establishing, the foundations of the town of San Basilio de Palenque (hereafter referred to as Palenque). Exactly when the city was founded is unknown, but there are studies indicating that this community was already established in the second half of the seventeenth century and ultimately became the first free African community in America.
Due to its strategic position located on the north coast of Colombia, Cartagena city was the centre of the Spanish slave trade and one of the main South American ports of arrival for slaves brought from different regions of Africa. The paucity of historical records makes it difficult to establish the exact place of departure of the slaves from Africa. Nonetheless, it is thought that until the early seventeenth century, the Africans arriving in Cartagena would have left from the region of Upper Guinea. Later, the Congo and Angola, together with Upper Guinea, would have been the major regions from which slaves were taken to Spanish America. At the end of the eighteenth century/beginning of the nineteenth century, slaves would have come from several regions, from Senegambia to Mozambique.
The village of Palenque is currently inhabited by approximately 4000 Afro-descendants who maintained a cultural and ethnic identity for more than 3 centuries, with high endogamy and little influence from neighbouring communities. Palenque preserves the ethnic conscience and cultural traits of African roots such as the social organisation, complex funeral rituals, and traditional medical practices, among others. Moreover, it is the only African American population speaking a Creole language with a Spanish lexical base. Due to these characteristics, Palenque was declared by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005. During the last decade, the recognition of the historical and cultural importance of Palenque has promoted several studies with the aim of reviving its history and searching for the African roots of its first inhabitants.
Given the high diversity of slaves arriving in Cartagena, one might suppose that several ethnic groups would be behind the foundation of Palenque. However, this theory has been questioned by linguistic and anthropological evidence, pointing to the region between Congo and Angola (the ancient Kingdom of Kongo) as the origin of the first habitants of Palenque, with an almost exclusive contribution from a single Bantu ethnic group, the Bakongo, speakers of Kikongo.
However, cultural and genetic features do not always come together, and few genetic studies have been performed to confirm a single geographic source of the founders of Palenque. The first genetic studies carried out with human leukocyte antigen (HLA) markers revealed limited Native American and European gene flow, as well as close genetic distances with African populations, especially from western Africa. Nevertheless, a higher than expected European input (38%) was detected when studying the pool of paternal lineages in Palenque. Due to the strong isolation of Palenque, paternal European admixture most likely occurred before its foundation. The results based on autosomal ancestry informative markers showed approximately 10% European ancestry, supporting a sex biased European influx.
