Guayaquil (; ), officially Santiago de Guayaquil, is the largest city in Ecuador and also the nation's economic capital and main port. The city is the capital of Guayas Province and the seat of Guayaquil Canton. The city is located on the west bank of the Guayas River, which flows into the Pacific Ocean at the Gulf of Guayaquil.
Name
The origin of the name of the city of Santiago de Guayaquil has been much discussed, although historians agree that it is pre-Hispanic. Since the founding of the city in 1534, it is linked to the name of Santiago in memory of its patron saint, Santiago, apostle of Christ, who is also patron saint of several other Spanish American colonial cities, such as Santiago de Chile, as he is of Spain itself.
One of the theories, based on a romantic legend, transmitted orally from one generation to another, attributes the origin of the name Guayaquil to the joining of the name of a leader named Guayas and of his wife Quil, symbols of the local resistance that — according to local tradition — chose to fight to the death (and as a final act, set fire to the town), rather than surrender to the Spanish conquerers.
The existence of a town with a name similar to Guayaquil, located near the city of Durán (Autopista Durán-Boliche km. 23), has brought investigations by archeologists and historians, who agree that the town, when it was conquered, was ruled by a man named Guayaquile. What was not decided was whether the name was given by the man to the town, or the town to the man. But the researcher Ángel Véliz Mendoza, in his book on the man Guayaquile, states that there are at least seven references to the toponym in pre-1543 documents. It is believed that the name Guayaquil is taken from the population's final home, in lands of the chief Guayaquile. This region was occupied by the "chonos" people whose archeological name is :es:cultura Milagro-Quevedo.
After several location changes and fires, the city was finally founded in 1547, and named the "Muy Noble y Muy Leal Ciudad de Santiago de Guayaquil" ("Very noble and very loyal city of Santiago de Guayaquil"). After the city's independence in 1820, the words "very noble and very loyal" disappeared as the city was no longer part of the Spanish Empire. Today, the official name of Santiago de Guayaquil is seldom used outside of official contexts.
History
Guayaquil was founded on 25 July 1538 by Spanish conqueror Francisco de Orellana in the location of a native village and given the name ("Most Noble and Most Loyal City of Santiago de Guayaquil").
On 20 April 1687, Guayaquil was attacked and looted by English and French pirates under the command of George d'Hout (English) and Picard and Groniet (French). Of more than 260 pirates, 35 were killed and 46 were wounded; 75 defenders of the city died and more than 100 were wounded.
In 1709, English captains including Woodes Rogers
and William Dampier, along with a crew of 110, looted Guayaquil and demanded ransom; however, they departed suddenly and without collecting the ransom after an epidemic of yellow fever broke out.
In colonial times Guayaquil was the chief Spanish shipyard in the Pacific, although some navigators considered that Valdivia (now in Chile) had better conditions.
Guayaquil was a stopover point in the commerce between Asia and Latin America conducted by Philippines-based Manila galleons, which had links to Acapulco in Mexico and terminated with a node in Callao, Peru.
In the late eighteenth century, the majority of slaves in the region were located in Guayaquil, where their life and work were conditioned by a practice called . The owners were in charge but the slaves had "considerable independence" in exchange for paying their owners a fee (the ) every day. Slaves like María Chiquinquirá, local hero because she successfully went to court in 1794 to argue her freedom, would work inside urban homes. Many slaves worked alongside free workers in the shipyards. By the turn of the nineteenth century, slaves had fought for their freedom in increasing numbers, and together formed a social group known as the .
On 9 October 1820, almost without bloodshed, a group of civilians, supported by soldiers from the "Granaderos de Reserva" battalion quartered in Guayaquil, led by the Peruvian Colonel Gregorio Escobedo, overwhelmed the resistance of the Royalist guards and arrested the Spanish authorities. Guayaquil declared independence from Spain, becoming the "Provincia Libre de Guayaquil", and José Joaquín de Olmedo was named of Guayaquil.