Ramón de Orozco Zuluaga married María Josefa Ocampo on February 28, 1810;
they had 11 children: Francisca, Mariano, Pedro, Leandro, Epifanio, Sandalio,
Bernardina, Anito, Jorge, Francisco, and Manuel Salvador. The vast majority of
those who bear the Orozco surname in southwestern Antioquia are descended
from them. Pedro, the third child, was the most influential of all the siblings.
The Orozco Ocampo family was part of a group of families from the eastern
municipalities of Antioquia who began the migratory process of founding towns
known as the Antioquia Colonization, which took place in the late 18th century and
much of the 19th century. Due to the isolation of Antioquia and the poverty in which
many families lived, they decided to go and exploit the Colombian territory,
especially the west, and that is how they founded many towns.
The Orozco Ocampo family left Sonsón in 1837, following the colonial road that
passed through Abejorral, Aguadas, and Arma, toward the state of Cauca, which
they crossed, arriving in Nueva Caramanta, now Caramanta, in 1838. From there,
they moved to the municipality of San Juan de Marmato, in the current department
of Caldas, to work as miners in its rich gold deposits and settled on a farm to be
close to the mine. Their travels also took them to El Hatillo, now Valparaíso, and
San Antonio de Támesis, where they accompanied Don Pedro in its founding. In
Marmato, Pedro had to provide supplies and provisions and take the gold to
Popayán. When he had saved enough money, he also began trading in mules and
cocoa, which he sold in the towns along the route from Cauca to Hato Grande, now
Girardota.
Pedro Orozco Ocampo was a compendium of struggles and triumphs. A visionary,
charitable, courageous, audacious believer, he was born in Sonsón on January 18,
1817, shortly after the war for Colombia's independence had ended. There, he
began his primary studies and then devoted himself to agriculture. He was a
founder of towns, a settler, a miner, a land
As many documents and books attest, he was one of the most influential men in
the colonization of the Southwest. At the Faculty of History of the University of
Antioquia, Professor Víctor Manuel Álvarez Morales and his students carried out
research on the most prominent businessmen of Antioquia in the 19th century,
which included Don Pedro. The Chamber of Commerce used these documents as
the basis for a weekly radio broadcast.
However, the most reliable evidence was his relationship since 1835 with the so-
called Echeverri Concession or Caramanta Concession, led by merchants from
Medellín headed by Gabriel Echeverri Escobar, who later became governor of
Antioquia; Juan Santamaría Isaza and Juan Uribe Mondragón, who bought
160,496 blocks of land from the national government between the Arquía River and
the San Juan River, where Támesis, Jericó, Caramanta, Valparaíso, Andes,
Jardín, Pueblorrico, and Tarso are located today.
With a good amount of capital, Pedro was invited by Don Gabriel Echeverri to
participate, along with other friends, in the concession, which was created in 1928.
Then, the honest worker, now a small capitalist, was no longer a simple laborer,
but an active member of the company that supplied livestock for consumption to
the English company in Marmato. In the distribution and transactions of the
concession's land, a considerable part passed into the hands of Pedro Orozco and
his brothers in 1851, specifically the area between the Cauca River and the Jardín
mountain range and from Arquía to Riofrío. The land where the municipality of
Jardín was established, which belonged to Mariano Anito, between two streams
known as Volcanes and El Salado, was purchased in 1860 by its founders,
Indalecio Peláez Velásquez and his wife Rosinda Clara Echeverri Sánchez.
Pedro was fortunate to become associated with this group of people dedicated to
trade and gold mining. These connections with the elite of Antioquia helped him
amass a great fortune, which he used to found towns, endow churches, hospitals,
schools, colleges, cemeteries, squares, roads, bridges, and educate his nephews
and more than a hundred poor children, whom he raised and educated as his own
and gave his surname to.
In 1840, the political unrest prevailing in the country forced him and his brothers to
take refuge in the jungle. He then emigrated to the north of Nueva Caramanta, and
the family built a hamlet they named El Hatillo, which is the origin of the current
municipality of Valparaíso, on land that, according to Don Tomás Uribe, was
donated by the Osorio, Ochoa, and Orozco families. Don Pedro did the same with
other landowners for the founding of Caramanta, known at that time as Nueva
Caramanta.
One of his most important achievements was the founding of the municipality of
Támesis, an undertaking in which he was accompanied by his brothers Sandalio,
Epifanio, Salvador, and Mariano. Civil unrest forced the Orozco family to flee on
several occasions. On this occasion, they took refuge in Jericó, but asylum was not
enough and they were forced to go deeper into the jungle, west of the Cartama
River, on land owned by Pedro, purchased from José Antonio Escobar Trujillo, a
neighbor of Fredonia, where he conceived the idea of founding the town on
December 25, 1858.
A group of thatched houses marked the beginning of the town. He donated 24
blocks for the construction of the urban area. On these blocks, the district
headquarters, schools, cemetery, a college, and the houses of the first people to
settle in his territory were built. With his own hands, he built houses for the most
needy and undertook, on his own initiative, the adaptation of a building for the
hospital. He also built the aqueduct and the beautiful fountain in the park, the
epicenter of the main square, which has been the most important site in the
municipality, where everything converges. In 1870, the owners were Pedro,
Mariano, Sandalio, and Manuel Salvador. Pedro, who was one of the most
economically powerful people, if not the most powerful, owned properties on three
sides of the square.
The first chapel in the fledgling town was built on land donated by Don Pedro, with
the permission of His Excellency Domingo Antonio Riaño, Bishop of Antioquia. The
first temple, strictly speaking, was Romanesque in style. Construction began in
1867, was completed at the end of 1873, and was inaugurated in 1874. In January
of that year, it was adorned with two bells donated by Mr. and Mrs. Orozco Gómez,
which were commissioned in London by my great-grandfather Manuel Salvador
Orozco. The bells arrived in Remolino (Atlántico), from where they were brought by
Mariano Orozco. They had such a sharp vibration and sonority that they could be
heard from remote corners of the town. The four-faced clock was purchased in
1894 for $1,200 from the mechanic Pedro Velilla, with money also contributed by
the aforementioned couple.
And the tireless worker for progress also managed, with the help of his brothers, to
get the then governor of the Province of Antioquia (1864) to elevate the already
important town of Támesis to the status of District.
Once the district had been divided up, the Orozcos collected their debts, packed up
their belongings, and in 1873 moved to the village of Anserma Viejo, then part of
the district of Quinchía, in Cauca, which was a dying hamlet with no permanent
priest and a ruined, lonely chapel, as its images, like helpless orphans, had been
distributed among the neighboring communities: the Christ of the Spaniards ended
up in the town of San Juan del Chamí; Saint Michael the Archangel remained in
the house of Captain Zoilo Bermúdez in Quinchía; and the Immaculate Virgin
ended up in the ranch of Moreta.
Pedro Orozco Ocampo is considered the true founder of the municipality of
Belalcázar, Caldas, on November 29, 1888, for which he donated 65 hectares,
together with Bartolomé Chaves. In the park of this municipality there is a statue of
Don Pedro and the Mayor's Office bears his name. Similarly, the municipality of
Risaralda was founded on July 1, 1916, on land acquired by Rudesindo Ospina
and Pedro Orozco.
As he knew the road to the state of Cauca like the back of his hand, he bought land
in Anserma and became the refounder of this municipality, which soon became a
welcoming and thriving town. No less important was his participation in the
Sociedad del Camino de Belalcázar, which was responsible for the construction,
with other partners, of the five-league-long Anserma-Belalcázar-Cartago road,
through a 40-year concession granted in 1880, a project carried out by Manuel
Salvador and Mariano Orozco.
Pedro Orozco and his brothers were both harmed and benefited depending on
which political party was in power. They were conservatives, although Pedro was
the most moderate of them all. They were persecuted, expropriated, and
mistreated, but at another stage in their lives, they were awarded land and were
able to found towns, which identified them as members of the local elite of
Caramanta, Valparaíso, Támesis, Anserma Viejo, and Belalcázar.
Don Pedro died on December 6, 1896, after falling off a cliff on the La Castalia
estate, near Támesis. In his honor, the Municipal Palace, which was originally
called the Town Hall, also bears his name. The current building, one of the most
striking and emblematic in the town, was inaugurated on July 16, 1971.
Regarding the place where he suffered the accident that cost him his life, the
eminent archaeologist and researcher from Amaga, Graciliano Arcila Vélez, wrote
in 1951: "One kilometer southwest of the town, there is a huge rock about 12
meters high, whose vertical face faces east; on the wall of the cliff, until a year ago,
there was a marble plaque with the following inscription in classical Spanish: ‘On
this rough cliff / Don Pedro Orozco / founder of Támesis, killed himself’. The plaque
has disappeared. In reality, Don Pedro Orozco, who was almost 80 years old and
struggling to clear the undergrowth, accidentally fell from this spot and died two
days later. This same rock, which has a hollow at its base, was the first shelter for
the colonizers when they had not yet built their first house, and it was also their
refuge when they were persecuted during the civil wars.