Who ruled Quito?

Quito lies in a long, narrow Andean valley at about 2,850 metres, on the eastern slopes of the Pichincha volcano just south of the Equator, which crosses the northern part of the metropolitan area. The fertile basins of the northern Andes supported dense farming populations long before the Spanish arrived, and the site became a regional centre first for local chiefdoms, then for the Inca, and then for Spain. Quito's history is shaped by that continuity of power, by its remarkable colonial churches, and by its claim to have raised the first cry for independence in Spanish South America.

Farming villages existed in the Quito basin thousands of years ago, and tombs at La Florida, on the city's northern edge, show that around 800 CE local elites were buried with fine shell, metal and textile goods. Later tradition spoke of a kingdom of the Quitu and Cara peoples, though historians now treat much of that story as legend. What is certain is that in the late fifteenth century the Inca Empire conquered the northern highlands after hard fighting. Under Huayna Capac, Quito became the empire's northern capital, and his son Atahualpa used it as his base in the civil war against his half-brother Huáscar that was ending just as the Spanish arrived.

After Francisco Pizarro captured Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532, the Inca general Rumiñahui fought on in the north and, according to Spanish accounts, burned Quito rather than let it fall intact. The conqueror Sebastián de Benalcázar founded the Spanish city of San Francisco de Quito on its present site on 6 December 1534, and Rumiñahui was captured and executed. The Spanish laid out a grid of streets on the ruins and over the following two centuries built some twenty churches and convents, among them San Francisco, begun in 1535, and the Jesuit church of La Compañía, covered inside with gilded carving. Indigenous and mestizo artists of the Quito School produced paintings and sculpture that were sent throughout the Spanish empire.

A royal audiencia was set up in Quito in 1563: a high court and government for a territory roughly matching modern Ecuador. It belonged first to the Viceroyalty of Peru and from the eighteenth century to the Viceroyalty of New Granada. Earthquakes struck the city repeatedly, and in 1765 its people rose against new royal taxes and briefly governed themselves.

On 10 August 1809 a group of Quito's leading citizens set up a governing junta, one of the first in Spanish America to act in defiance of the Spanish authorities. Royal troops crushed it, and on 2 August 1810 imprisoned leaders of the movement and many townspeople were killed. Independence came on 24 May 1822, when Antonio José de Sucre, Bolívar's general, defeated the royalists at the Battle of Pichincha on the slopes above the city, part of the Spanish American wars of independence. Quito joined Simón Bolívar's Gran Colombia, and in 1830 became the capital of the independent Republic of Ecuador.

Through the nineteenth century Quito was a conservative, church-dominated capital, often at odds with the trading port of Guayaquil. The railway between the two cities, completed in 1908, ended its isolation. Oil wealth from the 1970s drove rapid growth northward and southward along the valley. In 1978 UNESCO made Quito's historic centre, with Kraków, one of the first places on its World Heritage List. Its metropolitan district today has more than two million people, and Quito is Ecuador's political capital and its second-largest city after Guayaquil.