History
The Quijos region east of Coca was well known to the Incas, who ventured downhill to meet lowland tribes in peace and battle. It was also the first area east of the Andes to be penetrated by the Spanish. The anniversary of the European discovery of the Amazon River (February 12) is still celebrated in jungle cities with markets and fairs. Within a few centuries after European contact most of the region’s tens of thousands of inhabitants had fallen victim to smallpox and cholera.
The discovery of oil in the 1960s brought this once-stagnant backwater into the national consciousness. In the north, an oil pipeline helps transport the vast reserves that make Ecuador the third-largest oil exporter in Latin America.
Throughout the region, Quechua words on maps show the influence of the Lowland Quechua, who inhabit the foothills and forests in western Napo and northern Pastaza provinces. Also in the north are pockets of Siona/Secoya and Cofán. The Huaorani have a huge reserve in central Napo province and spill over into Yasuní National Park. To the south, the Shuar and Achuar saw their ancestral lands divided by the decades-old border dispute with Peru, which ended in 1998.
Read more about this topic: Oriente (Ecuador)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)