The González expedition continues north to the…
1522 CE
The González expedition continues north to the territories of Nicoya, where they find the largest concentration of native Americans.
From Cereceda's account, the Nicoyans offer no resistance and more than six thousand people are baptized, and more gold and pearls are obtained.
Nicoya is the largest cacicazgo (chiefdom) on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.
Though it is often surmised that the city and peninsula of Nicoya derive their name from a cacique Nicoa (or Nicoya) who welcomed Dávila and his men, actually Nicoya takes its name from the Nahuatl appellation Necoc Īāuh, literally "on both sides its water(s)", as Nicoya is in fact situated between two major rivers.
The Peninsula de Nicoya is itself named for the city, Nicoya being the most important town in this area.
Cereced reports a population of 6,063 inhabitants under Nicoya's leadership, almost five and a half times larger than the next largest settlement visited by the Spanish along the Pacific coast in the early 1520s.
According to sixteenth-century chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, who will visit Nicoya in 1529, the layout of the indigenous community is similar to that of the larger settlements in nearby Nicaragua and includes a central plaza with temples, a low pyramidal mound used for human sacrifice, and specialized plazas for markets and chiefs' residences.
Many of the earliest colonial documents about pre-Columbian Nicoya appear to have been lost in a fire that burned the town's archives in 1783.
In the resulting documentary vacuum, a number of interpretations regarding pre-Hispanic Nicoya have emerged.
Foremost among them is the belief that as the southernmost representatives of Mesoamerican culture, Nicoyans lived in nucleated villages, and that Cereceda's accounting of 6,063 souls merely represented the number of inhabitants of one village under chief Nicoya's control.
The modern city of Nicoya is generally believed to be on the site of this village.