Osvaldo Hurtado - Portrait of a Nation: Culture and Progress in Ecuador

J ohn Leddy Phelan, in his study El reino de Quito en el siglo XVII ( The Kingdom of Quito in the Seventeenth Century ), examined the meager results attained by the Spaniards, and later the Creoles, in their efforts to extend colonization to the tropical jungles of the coastlands and the Amazon territories of the Audiencia of Quito. These results were due to difficult access and inhospitable conditions. Phelan concluded that colonial life was thus concentrated mainly in the Andean region, a geographical area that years later, in 1830, would be the territorial basis for creating the Republic of Ecuador. The North American historian wrote, The two Quitos that we have already discussed, the Quito of the coast and the Quito of the Oriente, were marginal to the third and most important Quitothe valleys in the Sierra lying between the two chains of the Andes. 1

In effect, during the long colonial period the Sierra, or highlands region, was the most advanced and most populated region of the Audiencia of Quito. It accounted for more than 90 percent of the population and carried on farming, livestock-raising (sheep farms), and manual textile-making in mills known as obrajes . The subsistence of everyone depended on these activities. In the eighteenth century, the prosperous settlement of Quito in the central and northern Andes declined and became impoverished because of the destruction caused by earthquakes and the ruin of the textile industry. The latter was due to outside competition and lower demand resulting from a decline in the large American mining centers and the contraband introduced by the French, Dutch, and English. Nevertheless, Quito maintained its dominance because of the slight economic and demographic significance that other colonial regions continued to have.

The inter-Andean region offered colonists good land, a healthy climate, and abundant labor. According to Gironaldo Benzoni, Quito was the most fertile and abundant province of all of Peru. 2 Jesuit priest Mario Cicala was surprised by the admirable fertility of the province of Quito, where there was no kind of fruit, species of grain, variety of flower, type of vegetable, multiplicity of pasturelands, diversity of grasses, that are not seen to take root, grow and germinate in surprising abundance. 3 This observation was shared by the English-Irish chronicler William Stevenson, who served as secretary to Count Ruiz de Castilla in the last years of the Audiencia of Quito, when he noted the different climates that made it possible, in the course of just a few hours, to experience the cold of the poles, the stifling heat of the equator, and all of the temperatures in between, and also made it possible for its inhabitants to have a large variety of foods at their disposal. The surrounding abundance so caught his attention that he made the prediction that the country would at a future date become one of the most flourishing countries in the New World. 4 This prophecy was not fulfilled because of the way in which inhabitants of Quito and Ecuador did not make good use or, or take advantage of, the resources that nature had so generously bestowed upon them.