The first written record of Spanish interaction with the Qom appears at the beginning of the 1700s but no formal study of the Qom people was done until Father José Cardú, a Spanish Franciscan missionary, estimated that there were at least 4,000 Tobas living in the western or "dapiguem" region. The first missionaries to make contact with the Qom did not immediately try to introduce them to an agricultural lifestyle, an approach that was adopted in almost every other part of Latin America in order to "civilize" the indigenous group. Instead, the limited resources and the difficulties presented by the landscape of the Chaco forced missionaries to accept the Qom's hunter-gatherer lifestyle as the only sustainable option. The presence of the Spanish resulted in a great revolution for the Qom, in part because the Qom encountered a new and powerful enemy and in part because the Spanish involuntarily provided the Qom with a great contribution to their culture: in the 17th century the Qom began to utilize horses and soon developed a powerful equestrian complex in the center and southern part of the Grand Chaco region, known as the Chaco Gualamba.