Gonzalo Suárez Rendón

Gonzalo Suárez Rendón (ca. 1503, Málaga, Castile - 1590 (or 1583), Tunja, New Kingdom of Granada) was a Spanish conquistador, known as the founder of the capital of Boyacá; Tunja. He took part in the Spanish conquest of the Muisca, led by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada and later under his brother Hernán Pérez de Quesada. On August 6, 1539, he founded Tunja, the former seat of the zaque of Hunza, as Tunja was called in the time of the Muisca.

Gonzalo Suárez Rendón is mentioned in the work of uncertain authorship Epítome de la conquista del Nuevo Reino de Granada as "Suarex".

Biography
Gonzalo Suárez Rendón was born around 1503 in the Andalusian city of Málaga with parents Rodrigo Suárez Rendón de Jerez and Isabel Jiménez, or Ximénez, Suárez. He had one brother and one sister; Rodrigo Sabariego Suárez Rendón and María Suárez Rendón. He married Mencia de Figueroa y Godoy in 1563 and the couple got four children; two sons and two daughters.

Together with Hernán Pérez de Quesada and Gonzalo García Zorro, Suárez Rendón was one of the torturers of the last zipa Sagipa.

House in Tunja
The house built by Gonzalo Suárez Rendón (Casa del Fundador Gonzalo Suárez Rendón) between August 7, 1539, the day after the foundation of Tunja, and 1570, still exists as oldest colonial building of Tunja and only remaining house of a colonial city founder in Latin America, and is a museum since 1965.

Trivia

 * The Suárez River, the river the conquistadors followed to reach the Altiplano Cundiboyacense in early 1537, is named after Gonzalo Suárez Rendón when his horse drowned in the rapidly growing waters