The Painting of the lands, marshes, and swamps of the town of Bogotá was presented as evidence during a 1614 legal proceeding brought by the crown prosecutor of the New Kingdom of Granada against Francisco Maldonado y Mendoza, a renowned encomendero, over the ownership of lands in the Bogotá savanna.

The map features the Bogotá savanna, a high plateau on the eastern mountain range of the northern Andes in modern-day Colombia. In the early sixteenth century, the savanna was occupied by the Indigenous Muisca people of the Chibcha linguistic family. A Spanish expedition led by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada arrived there in 1536. From that moment on, the city of Bogotá became the base of operations for the Spanish empire in the region and was designated as the seat of the audiencia of Santafé in 1549.

The Painting of the lands, marshes, and swamps of the town of Bogotá is a manuscript that works both as a map and as a landscape painting and belongs to the genre of legal maps.

The estate (hacienda) depicted on the painting belonged to Francisco de Maldonado y Mendoza. His descendants obtained titles of nobility and the estate became the center of the Marquisate of San Jorge.