Page 10 - PAISA CULTURE_Neat

The Paisa Region, due to its natural resources, was initially agricultural and mining,

economic activities that marked its culture in the beginning. The difficulty to practice

agriculture in the high mountain then developed an economy that became essentially
commercial and mining, thus developing a culture of hikers, of drovers, which produced a

private economy of mono-production and export of gold, accompanied by an incipient

agricultural production of subsistence that was born around small towns4 All this
produced in parallel a financial class and sustainable solid, which lies in democratized

properties and fortunes, as happens with the GEA, or Grupo Empresarial Antioqueño, also

known as El Sindicato Antioqueño, the which is a property distributed among thousands

of people. Due to its shareholding and financial structure, this economic group is the first
Colombian Keiretsu.

Nowadays, a large part of its economy has diversified into industries. Its solid and
numerous production and marketing companies constitute one of the most important

economic centers of Colombia, represented by the so-called "Antioquia Syndicate and by

the intense production activity of the Coffee Axis." The region is one of the most
mountainous in South America, traversed in its entirety by the central and western

Andean Cordilleras and the valleys of the Cauca and Magdalena rivers, for this reason

Medellín is called "The Capital of the Mountain." The Paisa territory has many prominent
urban centers. Pereira, Manizales, Armenia, Carthage, Bello, Caucasia, Envigado,

Montenegro, Salento, Itagüí, Rionegro, La Tebaida, Chinchiná,