Quito rides an Andean volcano slope nearly three kilometres up
Quito, officially San Francisco de Quito, is Ecuador's capital and second-largest city, with about 1.7 million residents and 2.8 million in the metro area. It sits in a valley on the eastern flanks of active Pichincha volcano at roughly 2,850 metres elevation.
That height makes it the world's highest or second-highest national capital depending on whether Bolivia's seat is counted as La Paz or Sucre. Government, culture, and many transnational firms concentrate here beside Guayaquil as a twin industrial pole.
Sedentary settlement evidence reaches between 4400 and 1600 BC. Inca Huayna Capac took the Quitu lands in the late fifteenth century and made Quito the empire's northern capital; Spanish conquest in 1534 anchors the colonial founding date.
Few old quarters in the Americas are as large or as intact as its historic centre, and in 1978 Quito and Kraków became the first World Cultural Heritage Sites that UNESCO declared. It is also the capital nearest the Equator, which crosses the northern metro area in the parish of San Antonio. Human traces are far older than those villages: hunter-gatherers left obsidian tools dated to 8000 BC at El Inga on the Ilaló volcano, and the Cotocollao village of around 1500 BC spread over more than 26 hectares and exported obsidian to the coast.
Colonial Quito was founded in stages. Diego de Almagro set up Santiago de Quito near Riobamba on 15 August 1534 and renamed it San Francisco de Quito days later; Sebastián de Benalcázar then refounded it at the current site on 6 December with 204 settlers, after capturing the resistance leader Rumiñahui. The San Francisco Convent went up in 1535, first of about 20 colonial churches and convents. An 1809 independence bid was crushed in 1810, but Sucre's victory at the Battle of Pichincha on 24 May 1822 secured the city's freedom.
Source: Quito
