Cayambe (Stadt)

Cayambe is an agricultural service city (population 39,028 at the last census on November 28, 2010) in highland Ecuador. It lies at the foot of the Cayambe volcano. While the city is mainly peopled by mestizos, the surrounding rural population is primarily composed of indigenous people who are mainly involved in subsistence agriculture, dairy farming and procurement of lumber. It's the third largest city in Pichincha Province.HistoryCayambe's indigenous people of today are descendants of the pre-Inca Kayambi people. The Kayambi were resistant to Inca expansion and were only definitively conquered by Huayna Capac (the eleventh Sapa Inca of the Inca Empire) after a bloody 20-year war. At that time, the Kayambi people adopted the Kichwa language, a dialect of the Quechua family of languages. Not long afterwards, in the 16th century, the first Spanish conquistadores arrived in the region. Kichwa survives in some of the hamlets today, while in others it has given way to Spanish.