The name is Muysccubun - the language the Muisca spoke before Spanish arrived - and it has two candidate meanings. It may be a contraction meaning Flower of the Sun: uba for fruit or flower, sua for Sun, the final vowel clipped to make a possessive. Or it may come from sua and sie, sun and water. Either reading places Suba inside the Muisca sacred order, in which Sué the sun god and his sister the moon governed the high Andean plain. The locality is the 11th of Bogotá's 20 administrative districts, stretched across the capital's northwest - bordered by the municipality of Chía to the north, Cota to the west, and the localities of Usaquén to the east and Engativá and Barrios Unidos to the south. The Bogotá River forms two of its edges. The Juan Amarillo forms another. And the Suba Hills, low ridges of green in a mostly paved city, split the locality into two halves.

During the Last Glacial Maximum, roughly 26,000 to 19,000 years ago, the vegetation here shifted between high-altitude páramo grassland and Andean cloud forest. Hunter-gatherers arrived about 12,000 years before present. By 3500 BC their descendants were domesticating animals, planting crops, and making the distinctive ceramics that still turn up in archaeological surveys. By 500 BC, maize and potatoes dominated the diet. By AD 800 the Muisca had consolidated the culture that Spanish conquistadors would find here seven centuries later. In 1538 the Spanish conquest of the Muisca began, and in 1550 two Spaniards named Antonio Días Cardoso and Hernán Camilo Monsilva founded the village of Suba on Muisca land. For three centuries after that, the indigenous residents lived in a resguardo - a protected reserve established by the colonial government to keep them on the land they had always occupied. On 22 June 1850 the resguardo was abolished.

Suba is a place of water. Beyond the Bogotá and Juan Amarillo rivers, the locality contains the Torca and Guaymaral wetlands in the north, the La Conejera wetland in the northwest, Córdoba wetland in the middle, and Tibabuyes along the southern edge - a chain of Andean wetlands that support migrating birds, frogs, and a botanical community almost nowhere else on earth. The economy, on the dryer ground, grew into flowers. Suba is one of the centers of Colombia's export flower industry - the roses, carnations, and chrysanthemums that fill florist coolers in North American grocery stores on Valentine's Day week. Large shopping centers anchor commerce: Bulevar Niza, Centro Suba, Parque la Colina, Plaza Imperial, Santa Fé. The locality's rural northwest still contains farmland, a private airport, elite golf clubs, and the country estates of the wealthy.

Suba is administratively divided into twelve Zonal Planning Units - UPZs in the Bogotá bureaucratic vocabulary - that track the locality's dramatic social gradient. The southeastern quadrant, running through Niza and La Floresta and Prado, houses the upper middle class and the wealthy: Pontevedra, Santa Rosa, Morato, Malibú, Batán, Calatrava. The northeast is middle class: San José de Bavaria, Mazurén, Britalia, Casablanca. The southwest contains the original village of Suba and the neighborhoods that grew out from it - La Campiña, El Rincón, Tibabuyes, Lisboa, Berlín - mostly working class, densely populated, the heart of the locality's daily life. The northwest remains rural and elite. On a single TransMilenio bus line running up Avenida Suba, passengers move from one social register to another every few stops. It is the kind of geography Bogotá specializes in: four distinct worlds pressed into one administrative unit.

According to the Cabildo's own count, roughly 5,186 Muisca now live in Suba. The surnames carried down the generations are a record of who was here before the land was declared empty: Niviayo, Bulla, Cabiativa, Caita, Nivia, Chisaba, Muzuzu, Neuque, Yopasá, Quinche. The Cabildo Muisca de Suba maintains its own governance structure and representational presence in the locality's civic life. Central Park of Suba, the viewpoint of Los Nevados - where the distant snowcapped volcanoes of the Los Nevados range appear on clear days - and the sleek Julio Mario Santo Domingo Public Library give the locality's one and a half million residents their public spaces. On the hills above, the old Muisca names are carved into ridges that map views of a landscape the people who named them never entirely left.