The history of Ecuador

Ecuador, named after the equator that crosses it, packs the Pacific coast, the Andean highlands, the upper Amazon and the Galápagos Islands into a small country. Its coast was home to some of the oldest farming and pottery-making cultures in the Americas, and its highlands to a mosaic of chiefdoms that the Inca conquered only a generation before the Spanish arrived. From 1534 Spain ruled the region from Quito, first under Peru and later under New Granada. Independent since 1830, Ecuador has been shaped by the rivalry between conservative, Catholic Quito and liberal, commercial Guayaquil, by booms and busts in cacao, bananas and oil, by long border wars with Peru and, since the 1990s, by one of the strongest Indigenous movements in Latin America.

People had reached what is now Ecuador by the end of the last Ice Age. In the highlands near Quito, hunters left stone tools at El Inga, and on the dry Santa Elena peninsula the Las Vegas culture, from roughly 8000 to 4600 BCE, lived by fishing, gathering and hunting and began to cultivate squash and other plants, making the coast one of the early centres of plant domestication in the Americas. In the southern Amazonian foothills, at Santa Ana–La Florida in Zamora-Chinchipe, archaeologists of the Mayo-Chinchipe culture have found what is so far the earliest evidence anywhere of people using cacao, more than 5,000 years ago.

Around 3500 BCE the Valdivia culture of the coast was making pottery, among the oldest in the Americas, along with small stone and clay female figurines, and living in planned villages such as Real Alto, laid out around a central plaza. Valdivia was followed by the Machalilla culture, among the first in the region to grow maize, and then by the Chorrera culture, from about 1000 to 300 BCE, whose fine pottery spread across the coast and highlands. Coastal peoples traded the brightly coloured Spondylus shell, prized as a sacred offering throughout the Andes, to peoples far to the south.

From about 500 BCE many regional societies flourished. On the northern coast, the La Tolita culture, which spread into southern Colombia, produced masks and jewellery of gold and was among the first people in the world to work platinum. The Jama-Coaque and Bahía cultures of Manabí made elaborate clay figures of richly dressed people, and the Guangala lived along the southern coast. In the Upano valley of the Amazon, below the Sangay volcano, people built a dense network of earthen platforms, plazas and long straight roads from about 500 BCE, showing that large settled communities existed in the rainforest centuries before the Inca.

By the fifteenth century the coast was home to the Manteño and Huancavilca peoples, skilled weavers and metalworkers who sailed great balsa rafts with cotton sails along the Pacific coast, trading as far as western Mexico and central Chile. The highlands, divided into fertile basins between two ranges of the Andes, were held from north to south by the Pasto, the Caranqui and Cayambe, the Panzaleo, the Puruhá, the Cañari around modern Cuenca and the Palta. They farmed maize, potatoes, quinoa and beans, often with irrigation, and were organised in chiefdoms that sometimes allied in confederations. Later writers spoke of a single Kingdom of Quito ruled by a dynasty called the Shyris, but most historians now regard that kingdom as a legend. The Amazon lowlands were home to peoples such as the Shuar, Achuar, Cofán and Waorani, who largely kept their independence until the twentieth century.

The Inca Empire began to push north from Peru in the 1460s, when Pachacuti's son Topa Inca led his armies into the southern highlands. The Cañari were defeated and their main town rebuilt as the Inca city of Tomebamba, and the Inca built the temple complex of Ingapirca. Further north, the Caranqui and Cayambe resisted for years. Under Topa Inca's son Huayna Capac, the Inca finally crushed them in the early sixteenth century; the slaughter of their warriors at a lake near Ibarra gave it the name Yahuarcocha, "lake of blood". Huayna Capac spent much of his reign in the north, made Quito a second capital and moved loyal colonists into the region and rebellious local people out of it. Quechua, the Inca language, spread through the highlands, where its northern form, Kichwa, is still widely spoken.

When Huayna Capac died around 1527, probably in an epidemic of smallpox that had spread ahead of the Europeans, his sons Huáscar, based in Cusco, and Atahualpa, supported by the veteran northern armies at Quito, fought a bitter civil war. Atahualpa's generals won, capturing Huáscar in 1532, just as a small Spanish force was arriving on the coast.

The Spanish pilot Bartolomé Ruiz, sailing for Francisco Pizarro, had seized a Manteño trading raft off the coast in 1526, the first contact between Europeans and the peoples of the Inca world. In November 1532 Pizarro captured Atahualpa at Cajamarca, collected a huge ransom in gold and silver, and executed him in 1533 (see the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire). In the north, Atahualpa's general Rumiñahui fought on. Sebastián de Belalcázar marched on Quito with Cañari allies, who had their own grievances against the Inca, and Rumiñahui burned the city rather than surrender it. The Spanish founded San Francisco de Quito on its ruins on 6 December 1534, and Rumiñahui was captured and executed. Guayaquil, founded and refounded several times in the face of Huancavilca resistance, was established on its present site by the late 1530s. In 1541 Francisco de Orellana, part of an expedition from Quito in search of cinnamon and gold, floated down the Napo and became the first European to travel the length of the Amazon.

Quito became the seat of an audiencia, a royal court and government, in 1563, part of the Viceroyalty of Peru until 1720, when it was transferred to the new Viceroyalty of New Granada. Under the encomienda system Spanish settlers received the tribute and labour of Indigenous communities, and Indigenous people were also forced into textile workshops called obrajes, which made Quito's woollen cloth a major export to the mines of Peru. Epidemics, overwork and dislocation caused a steep fall in the Indigenous population. On the northern coast, Africans who escaped from a slave ship wrecked off Esmeraldas in the 1550s established an independent community that held off Spanish control for decades, the origin of a strong Afro-Ecuadorian presence in the province.

Quito became a centre of Catholic art, and the painters and sculptors of the Quito School supplied churches across South America. Jesuits from Quito founded missions far down the Amazon in the province of Maynas. In 1736 a French scientific expedition led by Charles-Marie de La Condamine arrived to measure the length of a degree of latitude at the equator, helping to settle the question of the earth's shape. The eighteenth century brought economic decline as cheaper European cloth undercut the obrajes, and Quito rose in revolt against new taxes in 1765. The physician and writer Eugenio Espejo became the region's leading voice of the Enlightenment and of resentment of Spanish rule.

After Napoleon deposed the Spanish king in 1808, Quito's Creole elite formed a junta on 10 August 1809, nominally loyal to Ferdinand VII. The movement soon collapsed, and on 2 August 1810 royalist troops massacred imprisoned leaders of the revolt. A second Quito government declared independence in 1811 and drafted a constitution, but forces from Peru crushed it in 1812.

The decisive rising came in Guayaquil, which declared independence on 9 October 1820 under the poet José Joaquín de Olmedo. Simón Bolívar sent his young general Antonio José de Sucre, who, with reinforcements sent by José de San Martín from Peru, won the Battle of Pichincha on the slopes above Quito on 24 May 1822. That July Bolívar met San Martín in Guayaquil, and the former Audiencia of Quito became the southern district of Gran Colombia, governed from Bogotá, as part of the wider Spanish American wars of independence. The region supplied men and money for the liberation of Peru and was a battleground in a war between Gran Colombia and Peru in 1828 and 1829. In 1830, as Gran Colombia fell apart, Quito's leaders declared a separate state named Ecuador, with the Venezuelan-born general Juan José Flores as its first president.

Flores dominated the new republic for fifteen years. Ecuador claimed the Galápagos Islands in 1832, and three years later Charles Darwin studied their wildlife during the voyage of the Beagle. Flores was driven out by a revolt in Guayaquil in 1845, and years of instability followed. Slavery was abolished in 1851 and the tribute paid by Indigenous people in 1857. In 1859, known as the "terrible year", the country splintered among rival regional governments while a Peruvian army landed near Guayaquil.

From that chaos emerged Gabriel García Moreno, the dominant figure of Ecuadorian conservatism. As president from 1861 to 1865 and again from 1869 to 1875, he built roads and schools, invited religious orders to run education, made Catholicism a condition of citizenship and in 1873 dedicated the country to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, ruling with an iron hand against opponents. He was hacked to death outside the presidential palace in 1875. Meanwhile, cacao exports from the coastal plantations made Guayaquil's merchants and bankers rich, and they backed the Liberals.

In 1895 the Liberal Revolution brought Eloy Alfaro to power. Alfaro and his successors separated church and state, confiscated church lands, introduced civil marriage, divorce and secular public education, and completed the railway from Guayaquil to Quito in 1908. Rivalry among the Liberals turned violent, and in January 1912 Alfaro and several of his companions were murdered by a mob in Quito and their bodies burned. Liberal governments closely tied to Guayaquil's banks ruled until the 1920s, when disease and West African competition ruined the cacao trade. In November 1922 troops fired on a general strike in Guayaquil, killing many workers, and in 1925 young officers seized power in the July Revolution, promising social reform.

Political instability marked the following decades. José María Velasco Ibarra, a spellbinding populist orator, was elected president five times between 1934 and 1968 but completed only one term, the others ending in his overthrow. In 1941 a long-running dispute with Peru over the Amazon lowlands erupted into war. Peru's larger army quickly occupied the southern province of El Oro, and in 1942 the Rio Protocol, guaranteed by the United States, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, gave Peru most of the disputed Amazon territory. Many Ecuadorians regarded the treaty as an imposed loss, and governments later declared it invalid, keeping the dispute alive for half a century.

After the Second World War, a banana boom made Ecuador the world's leading banana exporter and brought a period of stable constitutional government from 1948 to 1960, beginning with the presidency of Galo Plaza. In the 1960s, during the Cold War, the military removed Carlos Julio Arosemena in 1963 and ruled until 1966. Agrarian reform laws in 1964 and 1973 abolished the huasipungo system, under which Indigenous workers had laboured on haciendas in exchange for small plots.

In 1967 a consortium led by Texaco struck oil in the northern Amazon, and from 1972, when a pipeline over the Andes was completed, oil became the country's leading export. The military, which took power again in 1972, used the oil revenues to expand the state, and Ecuador joined OPEC in 1973. The boom transformed Quito and Guayaquil but brought heavy foreign borrowing, and drilling in the rainforest brought colonists, roads and pollution into the lands of the Cofán, Siona, Secoya, Waorani and Kichwa, later the subject of decades of litigation against the oil companies.

Democracy returned in 1979 with the election of Jaime Roldós, who died in a plane crash in 1981, the same year as a brief border clash with Peru at Paquisha. The 1980s brought a debt crisis, made worse by El Niño floods and a 1987 earthquake that broke the oil pipeline. In 1990 a nationwide Indigenous uprising organised by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, CONAIE, founded in 1986, blocked the country's roads and announced the arrival of Indigenous peoples as a national political force, demanding land, bilingual education and recognition of a plurinational state.

In 1995 Ecuador and Peru fought a short war in the Cenepa valley of the Cordillera del Cóndor, and in October 1998 the two countries signed a final peace treaty in Brasília that fixed the border, largely along Peru's line but with symbolic concessions to Ecuador. At home, governments followed one another rapidly. Congress removed Abdalá Bucaram in 1997, citing mental incapacity. A banking collapse in 1999 wiped out savings and sent hundreds of thousands abroad, and when President Jamil Mahuad announced that the US dollar would replace the sucre, Indigenous protesters and junior officers occupied Congress in January 2000 and he was forced out. His successor kept the dollar, which remains Ecuador's currency. In 2005 Lucio Gutiérrez, one of the officers of 2000, was in turn removed after mass protests in Quito.

Rafael Correa, elected in 2006, promised a "Citizens' Revolution". A constituent assembly wrote the 2008 constitution, which declared Ecuador a plurinational state and became the first in the world to grant enforceable rights to nature. Helped by high oil prices and loans from China, Correa's government built roads, hospitals and hydroelectric dams and reduced poverty substantially, and he defaulted on part of the foreign debt as illegitimate. His supporters saw a historic transformation; critics accused him of concentrating power and attacking the press and his opponents. In 2008 a Colombian raid on a FARC camp inside Ecuador caused a rupture with Colombia.

Correa's former vice-president Lenín Moreno, elected in 2017, broke with him, restored presidential term limits and turned to the International Monetary Fund. In October 2019 the end of fuel subsidies set off mass protests led by CONAIE that briefly forced the government to move to Guayaquil before the measure was withdrawn. Correa, facing corruption charges at home, has lived in exile since leaving office. The conservative banker Guillermo Lasso won the presidency in 2021, but his term was overshadowed by a sharp rise in violence as drug-trafficking gangs, using Ecuador's ports to ship Colombian and Peruvian cocaine to Europe and the United States, fought for control of prisons and cities. Facing impeachment in 2023, Lasso dissolved the National Assembly and called early elections.

Daniel Noboa, the young son of a banana magnate, won in October 2023. In January 2024, after the gang leader known as Fito escaped from prison and armed men stormed a television station during a live broadcast, Noboa declared an "internal armed conflict" and sent the army against the gangs. In April 2024 Ecuadorian police raided the Mexican embassy in Quito to arrest a former vice-president who had taken refuge there, drawing condemnation from Mexico and many other governments as a breach of diplomatic law. Noboa was re-elected in April 2025, and Fito was recaptured that June and extradited to the United States. In September 2025 cuts to fuel subsidies set off nationwide strikes and protests, and in a referendum on 16 November 2025 voters rejected Noboa's proposals to allow foreign military bases and to elect an assembly to write a new constitution. Ecuador thus faces the late 2020s with a dollarised, oil- and export-dependent economy, a powerful Indigenous movement and the continuing challenge of organised crime.