Ecuador

Ecuador, officially the Republic of Ecuador, sits on the northwestern shoulder of South America between Colombia, Peru and the Pacific, with the Galápagos Islands a thousand kilometres out at sea. Quito in the high Andes is the capital and Guayaquil the greatest port. The peoples of the coast and sierra were drawn into the Inca Empire in the fifteenth century before Spain laid its cities over them in the sixteenth. The Quito cry of 1809 failed, but Guayaquil rose on 9 October 1820, Sucre's victory at Pichincha in 1822 sealed freedom, and the land entered Bolívar's Gran Colombia, stepping out as a sovereign republic in 1830. Small and contested, Ecuador quarrelled with its great neighbours over borders drawn vaguely in colonial maps, losing ground to Peru more than once. Cacao made the fortunes of Guayaquil, bananas and then oil paid the twentieth century's bills, and a plurinational people of mestizos with large Indigenous, European, African and Asian minorities built a representative democracy that reached 1945 intact.