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Quito
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.
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 walk the narrow streets of the colonial city of Quito is to enter an older world, in which a Spanish empire existed…
It was Gonzalo Pizarro who, in 1541, organized the most famous and fateful expedition to find El Dorado, and we had come to Quito to do something which had never been done before – to follow in his footsteps on the ground. I'm hoping our adventure will reveal more about what happened then, and why. It might also tell us about the climate, geography and conditions the conquistadors went through; and about the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, recorded by Pizarro and Orellana for the first time; what they have gone through since, and the pattern of their lost history in the intervening centuries. [more]
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