Beni Department, Bolivia Genealogy

Guide to Beni Department family history and genealogy: birth records, marriage records, death records, census records, family history, and military records.



History
Beni was a very important center of a pre-Columbian civilization known as the hydraulic culture of Las Lomas a culture that constructed over 20,000 man-made artificial hills, all interconnected by thousands of square kilometers of aqueducts, channels, embankments, artificial lakes and lagoons, as well as terraces. Between about 4000 BC and the 13th Century AD this region was settled by sophisticated and organized groups of human societies. When the Spanish arrived, the region had already been in decline for about three hundred years. Between the 19th and 20th centuries northern Beni became Bolivia's rubber capital. The abundance of rubber trees attracted many people to the region, many of them adventurers and workers to work in the huge rubber plantations that arose. But these enormous rubber plantations all but disappeared by the end of the Second World War, as developers had been cultivating rubber introduced to plantations of Southeast Asia and Africa. Today many of the properties have been converted to cattle ranches. Only some small rubber producers still use the river to transport their production. 

Provinces
Beni Department capital is Trinidad. Beni Department is divided into the following provinces: