Ecuador lies in the northwest of South America, on the Pacific coast, between Colombia and Peru. Its name is simply the Spanish word for the equator, which runs just north of the capital, Quito. The country has four very different parts: a warm coast of banana plantations and fishing ports, the Andes mountains with their chain of volcanoes, the Amazon rainforest in the east, and, about 1,000 km out in the Pacific, the Galápagos Islands.
People lived here long before the Incas. On the coast, the Valdivia culture, one of the oldest settled cultures in the Americas, was making pottery more than 4,500 years ago. The Incas conquered the highlands between 1463 and about 1500, and the Spanish arrived in the 1530s and founded Quito in 1534. After the victory at Pichincha in 1822, Ecuador joined Simón Bolívar's Gran Colombia, and in 1830 it became an independent republic.
Memories fade faster than photos. Ask these over a meal or a phone call, and write the answers down.
Long before the Incas, farming and fishing peoples such as the Valdivia, the Quitu and the Cañari lived on the coast and in the Andes. The Incas ruled the highlands for less than a century before Spain conquered them in the 1530s. For almost three hundred years Quito was a Spanish colonial capital. Ecuador won its freedom in 1822, left Gran Colombia in 1830, and has been a republic ever since, with a long border quarrel with Peru that ended only in 1998.
From about 3500 BC, the Valdivia people lived in villages around central plazas on Ecuador's coast. It is one of the oldest settled cultures recorded in the Americas. They fished, grew maize, beans and cotton, and made pottery, including small clay figures known as the Venus of Valdivia.
Atahualpa, who had been governor of Quito, won a civil war against his half-brother Huáscar. In November 1532 the Spanish under Francisco Pizarro captured him at Cajamarca, in today's Peru, and executed him the next year.
In 1535 Bishop Tomás de Berlanga drifted by accident to the Galápagos Islands. There is no firm evidence that anyone had reached them before. Pirates later used the islands as a hiding place.
On 10 August 1809, leading citizens of Quito set up their own government and called for independence from Spain. It lasted only about two months, but it inspired the rest of Spanish America and gave Quito the nickname 'Light of America'.
On 12 February 1832, an Ecuadorian colonel held a ceremony on Floreana Island to annex the Galápagos. The date is still celebrated in the islands as Galápagos Day.
In 1895 the Liberal Revolution brought Eloy Alfaro to power. He reduced the power of the Church and the big landowners and pushed through the railway linking Guayaquil on the coast with Quito in the Andes.
After another brief war in the Cordillera del Cóndor in 1995, Ecuador and Peru signed a final peace agreement in Brasília on 26 October 1998, ending one of the longest border disputes in the Western Hemisphere.
In 2008 voters approved a new constitution, Ecuador's current one. It was the first in the world to give nature itself legal rights that can be defended in court, inspired by the Andean idea of Pachamama, Mother Earth.
Cook one of the recipes, print the large-print pack about Ecuador, and finish with the big-screen quiz or the words crossword. Grandchildren can colour the flag.
