Ancón (Ecuador)

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Ancón , completely San José de Ancón , is a place in Ecuador , the capital of a rural parish of the canton Santa Elena in the province Santa Elena on the Santa Elena peninsula in the west of the country. The parish of Ancón today has about 4,000 inhabitants on an area of ​​about 78 km².

geography

The parish of Ancón lies at an altitude of 10 to 70 m between the city of Santa Elena in the north, the rural parishes of José Luis Tamayo (Muey) and Anconcito in the west, which belong to Salinas , the Pacific in the south and the parish of Atahualpa in the canton of Santa Elena in the East.

Since the Santa Elena Peninsula is geographically a continuation of the coastal desert in northern Peru, the climate is tropical and arid. However, the area around Ancón is traversed by several small rivers.

history

Ancón is especially important because of the fact that the first successful test well for oil in Ecuador took place here in 1911 , the regular production of which began in the Ancón 1 oil field in 1925. The town of Ancón was initially created as an exploration camp in 1910 and grew rapidly after the start of production. As early as the 1920s, it was considered to be the place with the best infrastructure in Ecuador, among other things with regard to the supply of electricity. The settlements were owned by the London-based principal concessionaire Anglo-Ecuadorian Oilfields, Ltd. , the inhabitants were oil technicians and workers from all over the world, mainly from Great Britain and the Caribbean (Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados), but also from Canada, Germany, France, Poland, Italy, the USA and Australia. In 1923 the Roman Catholic Church of San José, which is today the eponymous, was put into operation by the Polish community . In the 1920s, three clubs emerged that attracted local, regional and national attention through social, cultural and sporting events: Club Nacional , Club Los Andes and the British West Indies Club, which is mainly supported by Jamaicans . The Club Los Andes was later also known by the fact that the players Alberto Spencer (1937-2006) and José Francisco Cevallos sr. From its youth soccer team . (* 1971) emerged. Long-time national defender Luciano Macías (* 1935) also comes from Ancón.

Ancón had been connected to Guayaquil via a rail link from Salinas since 1936. In the 1940s and 1950s, the English company expanded the camp into a real model town in the English colonial style, with houses, gardens and parks painted uniformly white. There were single-family houses, two-family houses, casinos with single apartments and workers 'houses with 10 apartments each for workers' families. Population growth continued in the 1950s and 1960s, also thanks to the refinery and port facilities in the neighboring towns of La Libertad and Santa Elena.

In 1976 the concession for the oil fields on the Santa Elena Peninsula fell to the state-Ecuadorian Corporación Estatal Petrolera Ecuatoriana (CEPE). In 1989 it was transferred to the newly founded Petroecuador and taken over by its subsidiary Petroproducción .

In 2002, San José de Ancón was then raised to an independent parish of the canton of Santa Elena. It had previously belonged to Atahualpa, which is now neighboring.

Economy and Infrastructure

The oil field is still exploited and represents the most important economic sector. It is managed on behalf of Petroproducción by the Escuela Politécnica del Litoral (Espol), a technical university in Guayaquil , and is currently licensed to Pacifpetrol, after the Argentine one from 1996 to 2001 Compañia General de Combustibles (CGC) had been responsible and passed their rights on to Pacifpetrol. Espol indicates the average daily production of the current Bloque Santa Elena production block , which also includes plants outside Ancón, with around 1,200 to 1,300 barrels daily in around 740 production sites (2003).

In addition to oil extraction, agriculture and livestock are practiced on a small scale. Due to the preserved English flair and its location on the Pacific Ocean, Ancón is also a destination for tourists to a limited extent.

Ancón has several schools, a technical high school, a hospital and an installation of Espol, v. a. for internships in the field of fishing and oil.

literature

  • Jenny Estrada, Ancón en la historia petrolera del Ecuador 1911-1976 , Guayaquil: ESPOL, 2001.

Web links