Arepa Period BOrigin theory BVerified

The arepa is a staple of Colombia and Venezuela: maize ground into a dough, shaped into a disk, and cooked on an iron griddle or an earthenware plate. Its main ingredient, maize, was a long-established crop of northern South America, in the hands of Indigenous cooks from early on.

The method is simple. Ground maize is worked into a dough, patted into a round, and baked on an unglazed clay plate (budare, or aripo). The arepa does not require nixtamalization, the step of cooking maize in an alkaline solution before grinding. It began as a staple of Indigenous households and, through the colonial period and after, became everyday food far more widely.

The name is usually explained as coming from erepa, the word for maize in Cumanagoto, a Cariban language. Europeans wrote about the bread early. The Italian Galeotto Cei, recounting what he saw between 1539 and 1553, is said to describe round maize breads as large as a plate, which the Indigenous people called "areppas." Pedro Simón's chronicle Noticias historiales, printed in Cuenca in 1627, defines the arepa in its glossary as a bread of maize dough pressed into thin tortillas and cooked over a gentle fire on earthenware plates, serving the same purpose as wheat bread. Arepas, Simón adds, are often made richer with eggs, fat and other things.

The arepa's origin is most often told as a contest between Colombia and Venezuela over which came first. Colombians point out that the Muisca and Zenú were eating maize bread before the Spanish arrived, and cite an estimate placing it on their highlands some three thousand years ago. Venezuelans point to the word itself, which comes from Cumanagoto erepa.

The colonial record paints a different picture from the national quarrel. Pedro Simón's chronicle of 1627 tells how, when English forces seized Caracas in 1595, Indigenous women were given no sleep, night or day, while they made arepas for so many. Within a few decades of the conquest, then, the arepa was on record under an Indigenous name, baked by Indigenous women as everyday bread. The natural reading is that it was a bread the Indigenous peoples of this land were already making before the Spanish came.

What neither side has is evidence that would settle where the very first arepa was baked. The three-thousand-year figure is widely repeated, but the sources given for it are blogs and travel articles, not excavation reports. Earthenware plates of the same kind are said to have been used for baking cassava bread (casabe) as well, so a plate found in the ground is no proof of the arepa. And even if erepa was the word for maize, the word cannot tell us where the first arepa was made.

Neither the Colombian claim nor the Venezuelan one denies the starting point, a maize bread of the Indigenous peoples. What they dispute is which side of today's border should get a bread that was being baked long before any border was drawn. The claims are bound up with national pride, and they have been put to use as political symbols too.