Santo Domingo de los Colorados
| Santo Domingo | |
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Coordinates: 0 ° 15 ′ S , 79 ° 10 ′ W
Santo Domingo on the map of Ecuador
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 Location of Santo Domingo in Ecuador
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| Basic data | |
| Country | Ecuador |
| province | Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas |
| City foundation | May 29, 1883 |
| Residents | 238,325 (2005) |
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| Detailed data | |
| height | 655 m |
| Time zone | UTC -5 |
| City Presidency | Kléber Paz y Miño |
| Website | |
Santo Domingo de los Colorados is a city in Ecuador . Officially (January 1, 2005) it has 238,325 inhabitants, making it the fourth largest city in the country. It has been the capital of the canton of Santo Domingo since 1967, the seat of the Catholic diocese Diocesis Coloratensis since 1997 and the capital of the new province of Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas since 2007 .
Geography and urbanization
Santo Domingo de los Colorados lies at an altitude of 600 m at the foot of the West Andes . In its surroundings there are tropical rainforests and numerous plantations of tropical products. With average daily temperatures of around 25 ° C, the climate is characterized by high humidity and rainfall, which have earned Santo Domingo the nickname “City of Eternal Fog ”. Hundreds of tropical bird and butterfly species live in the surrounding rainforests and nature reserves.
Santo Domingo is 79 km west of Quito in the province of Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas, which borders the provinces of Pichincha , Cotopaxi (southeast), Los Ríos (southwest), Manabí and Esmeraldas , which was founded in 2007 from the canton of Santo Domingo in the west of the Pichincha province has been. Since the completion of the 130 km long road to Quito ( 1947 ), which overcomes a difference in altitude of more than 2,200 meters, Santo Domingo has been a traffic junction through which one can reach the coastal provinces of Esmeraldas, Manabí and Guayas from the northern Sierra of Ecuador .
This street is also responsible for the enormous growth of Santo Domingo since the 1940s , as it has brought and continues to lead to an influx of settlers and the emergence of official, but also uncontrolled and poorly developed settlements ( invasiones ), including nature and the indigenous people of the area, the Colorados / Tsáchilas, suffered greatly. Probably more than 80% of the city's inhabitants do not come from the Pichicha province, but from other parts of the country (provinces Manabí, Loja , Bolívar , Tungurahua , Chimborazo ) and the south of Colombia .
According to estimates, the population is well above the officially stated between 300,000 and 500,000 people.
history
City and Canton
Santo Domingo de los Colorados is a "melting pot" that has only become a city since the 1930s and 1940s with the construction and traffic of roads that lead from Quito to the coast and branch out in Santo Domingo, attracting large flows of migrants .
In the colonial period, the sparsely populated area around today's Santo Domingo belonged to the Provincia de Yumbos , later to the Governación de las Esmeraldas of the Real Audiencia de Quito . The name Santo Domingo for the area was probably created around 1660 in the course of missionary efforts by the Dominicans . The region or tribal name Colorados de S. Domingo can be found on the map printed by Pedro Vicente Maldonado in 1750 . In 1861, the rural parish ( parroquia rural ) Santo Domingo was established as an administrative unit . Under the government of the dictator Gabriel García Moreno , the construction of a transport route to Manabí began in 1871, which led via Santo Domingo and brought with it the first wave of immigration, which mainly consisted of day laborers , rubber tappers and workers for road construction and haciendas . The founding date of Santo Domingo is sometimes mentioned as May 29, 1883, when the parish passed from the canton of Quito to the sovereignty of the newly established canton of Mejía.
In 1899 the Pueblo de Santo Domingo de los Colorados was founded and thus the first official settler colony. However, during the first decades of the 20th century it had no more than 500 inhabitants.
In the 1930s and 1940s, another road construction project, which had been in operation since 1919, was completed: in 1947 the road from Quito via Aloag to Santo Domingo was completed, which reached the coast in Esmeraldas in 1949 .
Since the 1950s, the city has also grown, as the government, after a drought in the southern Andean region, settled farmers in the vicinity of Santo Domingo, deprived of their livelihoods. In this way, a more extensive land reform in the Sierra could be circumvented.
Santo Domingo quickly developed into a center of the local agriculture and plantation economy, which mainly benefited from the increasing global demand for bananas and palm oil in the 1960s .
On June 3, 1967, the canton of Santo Domingo was set up on an area of 3,857 km² as an administrative unit of the Pichincha province.
In 1987, the Roman Catholic Church established an Apostolic Prefecture in Santo Domingo , which was elevated to a diocese in 1996 . The first bishop was the (retired now) from the German district of Sigmaringen coming Emil floor .
In a referendum on November 26, 2006, 83.6% of voters from the canton were in favor of raising the former canton of Santo Domingo de los Colorados to a province (6.5% voted no, the rest of the ballot papers cast) were empty or invalid). The “Provincialization Committee” then initiated a corresponding political process, which the Ecuadorian President and the National Congress must agree to. The situation became more concrete in October 2007 when the Province of Santo Domingo was established together with the new Province of Santa Elena .
The Colorados / Tsáchilas
The part of the name de los Colorados is derived from the indigenous community of the Tsáchilas (dt. "Real / real people"), who are called Colorados by Spanish-speaking Ecuadorians . The name Colorados (Spanish for “colored” / “colored”) stems from the fact that men in particular traditionally dyed their hair red with dyes made from achiote seeds . However, this tradition has lost much of its importance today and is practically only maintained by communities that are regularly visited by tourists. Traditional clothing is also increasingly mixed with “Western” imported goods. The Tsáchiles speak their own language, the Tsafiki , which is related to the cha'palaachi of the neighboring Chachi and is considered by some researchers to be part of the (controversial) language family of the Chibcha . Tsafiki / Colorado has the language code sai according to ISO 639-2 and COF according to SIL. The Tsáchilas are one of the few pre-Inca cultures that still exist. However, due to the spread of Santo Domingo and the adaptation to city life by many of its relatives, its culture is threatened with extinction. At present there are still around 200 families who live in a more or less traditional way on around 8,000-10,000 hectares of rainforest. In 1978 they were given official title to the land, but this is difficult to enforce in the event of illegal land occupation by new settlers ( invasiones ). Today those Tsáchilas who have not adapted to life in Santo Domingo live mainly from agriculture (bananas, coffee, corn and yuka) and in some cases work as tour guides through the species-rich forests. In Santo Domingo itself today, the names of hotels, streets and squares as well as a large iron monument for the Colorados in the center of a roundabout west of the city center are reminiscent of the Tsáchilas.
Economy and Infrastructure
Santo Domingo de los Colorados is primarily a transshipment point for the local plantation economy, before their products are transported to the major cities of the country and abroad. The main crops of these are bananas, oil palm , sugar cane , coffee, but also fruits such as pineapple , papaya , passion fruit and tropical flowers. Palm and banana oil is obtained from palms and bananas .
The livestock and dairy industry has also experienced a significant boom in recent decades and today takes up more than 50% of the area of the canton of Santo Domingo.
Santo Domingo is still the fastest growing city in Ecuador and shows the views of the rapid urbanization of cities in developing countries: the settlement is often uncontrolled and illegal, is associated with natural destruction and leads to districts with no or only very basic infrastructure. Unemployment and underemployment are high, so that a not inconsiderable part of the population is engaged in street and retail trade.
A campus of the Universidad Tecnológica Equinoccial (Quito) has been located in the city since 1986 . Mainly agricultural economics , agricultural engineering , forestry , electrical engineering and business administration are taught there.
Attractions
Santo Domingo itself is more of a messy, unattractive, fast-growing frontier city and is therefore of little tourist interest.
Tourism is primarily ecological: bird and butterfly watching and fishing are particularly popular activities on haciendas set up for this purpose and in nature reserves in the area.
Personalities
- Emilio Lorenzo Stehle (1926–2017), Former Bishop of Santo Domingo de los Colorados
- Ivo Schaible (1912–1990), father and artist
- Cristian Ramírez (* 1994), football player