thumb|right|250px|View of the sacred Iraca Valley (Floresta, Boyacá|Tobasía) The iraca, sometimes spelled iraka, was the ruler and high priest of Sugamuxi in the confederation of the Muisca who inhabited the Altiplano Cundiboyacense; the central highlands of the Colombian Andes. Iraca can also refer to the Iraka Valley over which they ruled. Important scholars who wrote about the iraca were Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita, Alexander von Humboldt and Ezequiel Uricoechea.
thumb|right|250px|View of the sacred Iraca Valley (Floresta, Boyacá|Tobasía) The iraca, sometimes spelled iraka, was the ruler and high priest of Sugamuxi in the confederation of the Muisca who inhabited the Altiplano Cundiboyacense; the central highlands of the Colombian Andes. Iraca can also refer to the Iraka Valley over which they ruled. Important scholars who wrote about the iraca were Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita, Alexander von Humboldt and Ezequiel Uricoechea.
== Background == thumb|right|250px|Reconstruction of the Sun Temple (Sogamoso)|Sun Temple of Sugamuxi, where the iraca lived In the centuries before the Spanish conquistadores entered central Colombia in the 1530s, the valleys of the Eastern Ranges were ruled by four main leaders and several independent caciques. The northern territories were ruled by the zaque from Hunza, the present-day capital of Boyacá department and the southern area under the reign of the zipa, based in Bacatá, currently known as the Colombian capital Bogotá. Other important rulers were the iraca and the cacique Tundama based in Tundama, today known as the city of Duitama. The Muisca were one of the four advanced civilizations of the Americas, between the Aztec and Maya civilization in the north and the Incas south of Colombia.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).