Once the road was restored, Neiva was re-founded in 1612, a task undertaken by Diego de Ospina y Medinilla, which he brought with him to the Jesuit missions, to which he entrusted them with the reconstruction of Villavieja and entrusted them to all the Indians, from this region to Tierradentro. The Spaniards who arrived during the second half of the seventeenth century lived on gold and agricultural products that were paid by the Indians. Then, of the agriculture and the cattle ranch that was impelled by the great haciendas by means of the use of the slave labor of the native. Later, faced with the shortage of aborigines, the latifundistas used blacks. An example of this phenomenon was the hacienda Aposentos de Villavieja, which, for over a hundred years, was owned by the Jesuits. It had more than 20,000 hectares and 10,000 heads of cattle to supply meat to the capital of the viceroyalty, Santafé de Bogotá. The house of the Hato de Bateas, as it is now called this old hacienda, still stands in the rural area of ​​the municipality of Villavieja and is a living example of colonial architecture in Huila. The tranquility lived in the territory during the Colony, was broken for the same time of the revolution of the Comuneros of José Antonio Galán. The rebels were led by Pedro León Perdomo and Toribio Zapata, and as also happened with the villager Galán, they made their proclamations in the name of Tupac Amarú, and were finally shot.

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During the eighteenth century there was a policy of urbanization promoted by Spain, thanks to the economic power of the landowners. This is how the San Agustín, Garzón, Guadalupe, Suaza, Altamira, Tarqui, Gigante, Paicol, Tesalia, Villavieja, Yaguará, Palermo and Aipe municipalities were founded. On July 27, 1810 came the cry of independence to these lands, seven days after the events in Santafé de Bogotá. José Acevedo y Gómez warned his commercial partners of Huila, the López, the Salas, the Díaz and the Tello, who proclaimed the freedom of Neiva and later, in the Spanish reconquest, they died at the hands of Juan de Sámano. Neiva then joined the liberating army of Simón Bolívar with a battalion to liberate Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. After the emancipation, Neiva was part of the department of Cundinamarca until 1863, when it became part of the federal state of Tolima, being its first capital. After the war of the Thousand Days, in the Constituent Assembly of 1905 Huila was created as a new administrative political entity within the republic. At present, this department lives from the agroindustrial production of rice, coffee, tobacco, sorghum and corn, and from the boom of tourism focused mainly towards the area of ​​the Colombian massif, San Agustín, Neiva, the Tatacoa desert, the hot springs of Rivera and the Betania Dam.