In 1526, the Spanish pilot, Bartolomé Ruiz , sailed down the Ecuadorian coast on a reconnaissance mission and, near Salango, captured a large Manta merchant vessel laden with gold, silver and emeralds. His report convinced Francisco Pizarro that there were great riches to be had on the continent. After obtaining royal approval, Pizarro set sail from Panama in December 1530, with 180 men and 37 horses, landing at Tumbes , in northern Peru, in May 1532, with a few more troops brought by two other hardy campaigners, Sebastián de Benalcázar and Hernando de Soto. The Inca city, which marked the northernmost limits of the Empire on the coast, lay in ruins from the civil war, and bodies hung from the trees nearby. The Spaniards soon learnt that the civilization had been in the grip of a terrible conflict, and saw that this made the perfect opportunity for conquest.

 

Pumped up on his victory over Huáscar's army of almost a hundred thousand, Atahualpa didn't regard the Spaniard's straggly band of a few hundred as much of a threat - even the foreigners' fearsome horses, an unknown quantity to the Incas, ate grass and not flesh, as was rumoured. In a fatal miscalculation, the new emperor invited them to a meeting at Cajamarca , letting them past countless guard posts and strongholds and over mountainous terrain that would have been too steep for cavalry attacks. A day after their arrival in Cajamarca, Pizarro launched a surprise attack, taking Atahualpa hostage and massacring thousands of Inca soldiers and nobles in just a few hours. Many more were trampled to death in the terror-stricken stampede to escape the Spanish guns, steel armoury and cavalry. Atahualpa, seeing that his captors craved precious metals, offered to fill a room with gold and two huts with silver, in return for which Pizarro promised to restore him to his kingdom at Quito. Within a few months, six metric tons of gold and almost twelve tons of silver had been melted down, making rich men of the conquistadors. Nevertheless, they broke their promise and, fearing a counterattack, swiftly condemned Atahualpa to be burnt alive - a terrifying prospect for someone who believed his body must be preserved for passage into the afterlife - unless he became a Christian. In July 1533, the weeping Inca was baptized and then garrotted.

The Spanish quickly took Cuzco and southern Peru, and then turned their attention to Quito and the northern empire, modern Ecuador - a race was on to find the suspected treasures of its cities. In March 1534, the merciless governor of Guatemala, Pedro de Alvarado , gathered a formidable army, including several thousand Guatemalans, and landed on the Ecuadorian coast in the Manta area. Locals, who entreated him with offerings of food, were either slaughtered or thrown into chains and taken on his campaign. Despite torturing natives to find the best route into the highlands, he ended up going over the highest and most treacherous pass near Chimborazo, and lost many men and horses, as well as the race to Quito.

Sebastián de Benalcázar , meanwhile, had got wind of Alvarado's expedition early on, and swiftly summoned his own forces together, riding across the bleak Peruvian coast onto the Inca highway to Quito. In Tomebamba, where he found beautiful temples encrusted with emeralds and plated in sheets of gold, he forged an alliance with the Cañari, who were bent on exacting revenge for years of subjugation under the Incas. A couple of large Inca armies were still mobilized in the north, and in the cold páramo grasslands at Teocajas above Tomebamba, Rumiñahui , the tenacious Inca general, prepared his 50,000 troops for attack. They fought bravely, despite a series of devastating cavalry charges, but it was clear that it would take a miracle to beat the Spanish and their horses. He devised a number of ingenious traps, such as pits laid with sharp spikes hidden under the thick grasses, but each time their location was betrayed by informers. Rumiñahui battled with Benalcázar all the way to Quito and before the Spanish could get there, he removed the treasures and torched the palaces and food stores. Then, joining forces with another general, Zopozopagua , he launched a night attack on the Spanish encamped in the city, but again was thwarted by superior military hardware. Eventually both Rumiñahui and Zopozopagua were caught, tortured and executed. Quisquis , the last of Atahualpa's great generals, valiantly fought his way from southern Ecuador to Quito, but when he found the city had already been taken, his army mutinied, hacking him to pieces rather than face death on the battlefields.

In August 1534, the Spanish city of San Francisco de Quito was founded on the charred remains of the Inca capital, and a few months later the northern part of the Inca empire was conquered. The inaccessible north coast and much of the Oriente, however, were deemed too difficult and unproductive to colonize, and stayed out of their control for much of the colonial era. Even so, the Conquest had had a devastating effect on the native populations of Ecuador through war, forced labour and, above all, Old World diseases . Smallpox, measles, plague and influenza cut the aboriginal population down from 1.5 million to just 200,000 by the end of the sixteenth century - an overall decline of over eighty-five percent.