Conquistadors by Michael Wood

Author:Michael Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448141500
Publisher: BBC Books

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EL DORADO

THE JOURNEY OF FRANCISCO ORELLANA

Many nations have excelled others and overcome them, and the few have conquered the many. They say Alexander the Great with thirty-three thousand Macedonians undertook to conquer the world. So with the Romans too. But no nation has with such resolution passed through such labours, or such periods of starvation, or covered such immense distances as the Spanish have done. In a period of seventy years they have overcome and opened up a new world, greater than the one of which we had knowledge, exploring what was unknown and never before seen. And this exploration of Gonzalo Pizarro, we are bound to say, was the most laborious journey ever undertaken in these Indies.

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PEDRO DE CIEZA DE LEON The War of Chupas, 1545

CLIMB UP THE wooden ladder inside the crumbling eighteenth-century clock-tower, past a dusty pile of old pendulum weights, and a broken organ, and you will find yourself out on the roof of the Franciscan monastery of La Merced. Walk over the undulating expanse of green and brown tiles, over the humped cupolas and oriels, and you suddenly come to the towering corner of the nave roof. There are few better places to view the Spanish presence in the New World – in front of you is a magnificent vista of the old city of Quito in Ecuador.

The most charming and atmospheric of all the capital cities of the Americas, Quito lies in a rugged valley, flanked by majestic mountains, and on a clear day the view from the Merced roof takes in breathtaking vistas of snow-capped volcanoes. To the east, the high Andes rise, shading into the clouds, their blue-grey shoulders and gleaming white peaks emerging and disappearing into the haze.

Centred almost dead on the Equator, Quito has a wonderful spring-like climate outside the rainy season and, at 9000 feet, the air is exhilarating – especially in the early morning before the clouds come in.

In the cloisters right below us, white-clad monks are hurrying to matins. Just over the precinct wall, the old town is waking up: a warren of old streets, whitewashed houses with terracotta roofs, a little hotel with an ornate red and white façade, an open-air market, its covered stalls jamming the alleys where Indian traders are unloading their bundles of weavings.

Further away, over the rooftops, are the great squares of the old city, with their colonial arcades, the grand buttresses of convents and monasteries, and the spires and towers of San Francisco, La Compania, San Augustin. And, perched over the old town, often shrouded in the mist which rolls in from the Andes, is the great statue of the winged Virgin of Quito, with her crown of stars and her eagle’s wings. Beneath her feet is the chained dragon of the Book of Revelations, coiled on top of the globe, a prophecy and a riddle.

To me, no town so conveys the flavour of that astonishing era of the conquest: the three centuries of Spanish adventure in the New World. To

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