Ecuador

From the Valdivia potters and the Quitu-Cara of the high Andes to a northern Inca capital, the Real Audiencia of Quito, the first cry of independence in 1809, the victory at Pichincha in 1822, and the separate republic born in 1830 on the line of the Equator.

Ecuador's history reaches back more than five thousand years to the Valdivia culture of its Pacific coast, whose fired-clay figurines are among the oldest ceramics known in the Americas. In the highlands the Quitu and Cara peoples built the chiefdoms around Quito that the Inca, advancing from the south under Topa Inca Yupanqui and Huayna Capac, absorbed in the late fifteenth century, making Quito a northern seat of empire and the base of the last Inca ruler, Atahualpa. Spanish conquest followed in the 1530s, and the colonial Real Audiencia of Quito became famous for the Quito school of religious art before Quito's criollos raised the first cry of independence on 10 August 1809, earning the city the title Luz de America. Antonio Jose de Sucre secured that independence at the Battle of Pichincha on 24 May 1822; after eight years inside Simon Bolivar's Gran Colombia, Ecuador emerged as a separate republic in 1830, and through cacao, banana and oil booms, chronic political instability, the dollarisation of 2000 and a recent security crisis it has made its way to the present.