Last modified: 2009-07-26 by dov gutterman
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image by Jens Pattke, 29 October 2002
see also:
The flag above is based on the province
official site.
Falko Schmidt, 29 October 2002
The flag is presented on the municipal
website as follows:
"Decree No. 1634
The flag of the town was officialized on 17 May 1944 by the
Municipal Council of Quito. It is made of a horizontal rectangle
divided into three parallel stripes: the central part is red and
the two lateral parts are blue. In the middle is shows a castle
as a symbol of strength, nobleness and loyalty of the town. The
finial of the staff is decorated with the golden ribbon of St.
Francis."
There is more information on the website
of the Province of Pichincha. The text is exactly as above,
but there is an image of the flag showing the central red stripe
twice wider than the blue ones.
There are several reports of the flag with the municipal coat of
arms instead of the castle. The most recent sighting is a
photograph, published in "La
Hora" on 21 October 2008, of the last meeting of the
Supreme Court of Justice, to be replaced soon by the new National
Court of Justice.
The coat of arms is described on themunicipal
website as follows:
"Decree No. 3111
The coat of arms of the Town of San Francisco de Quito was
granted by Emperor Charles V, King of Germany and Spain, by the
Royal Letter signed on 14 March 1541 in the palace of Talavera,
Spain. This Letter, following a first Letter granting the title
of Town to an Francisco de Quito, granted to the town a coat of
arms which has been used until today.
The Royal Letter grants to Quiot "all the pre-eminences,
prerogatives and immunities that it can and shall have as a
town" and commission the whole Royal Court to respect and
let respect this rank for Quito. The document prescribed to the
new Town of Quito a coat of arms and a blazon, which have been
kept until now and make of the coat of arms of Quito the oldest
of all the coats of arms granted to towns and provinces of
Ecuador, highlighting the importance of the town in the history
of our country.
The Emperor ordered the coat of arms of Quito to be "a
castle argent surrounded by two mountains or rocks, with a green
cave on the base of each of them, on the top of the castle a
cross or with a base vert hold in their claws by two eagles sable
fimbriated or, one dexter and the other sinister, [...], the
whole on a field gules; an orle made of the St. Francis ribbon or
on a field azure".
The coats of arms was immediatly used in all the documents of the
town's administration. According to a report published in
1914 by Pedro Pablo Traversari, once a Municipal
Councillor in Quito, and whose original illustrated manuscript is
thoroughly kept in the reserve of the Municipal Historic Museum,
the oldest reproduction of the coat of arms of Quito that we can
still observe is the coat of arms encarved in a stone located on
the facade of the St. Augustine convent. According to Traversari,
this coat of arms is dated 1573.
For the commemoration of the 460th anniversary of the Royal
Letter, Paco Moncayo, Mayor of the Metropolitan Disctrict of
Quito, unvealed last March a polychromous coat of arms of Quito,
encarved in cedar wood by the artist Whitman Villalba. Villalba's
coat of arms is a model based on Traversari's detailed drawing
and reproducing the central element of the coat of arms of Quito,
the crenelled tower, crowned by the cross, in a beautiful
silversmith's piece kept by the municipality for centuries [...]
This work is part of the Hall of the Coat of Arms of Quito,
located in the Municipal Palace and placed under the custody of
the Metropolitan District of Quito."
The website
of the Province of Pichincha gives fragments of this text.
Ivan Sache, 26 October 2008
![[Flag of Quito]](../images/e/ec-p-q.gif)
image by T.F. Mills, 11 December 1997
Quito's flag is a blue-red-blue tricolour, and about half of
them showed a coat of arms.
I made the "Variant (?)" from a small flag which I
purchased in Quito shortly before submitting them. I saw
many more like them on buildings and none like the 1944 model --
so I think your assumptions are fairly sound. I know very
little about the vexillographic culture of Ecuador, but in my
experience much of the world does not have "sealed
patterns". It is therefore possible that the
difference is not an official evolution.
T.F. Mills, 11 December 1997 and 13 December 2001
![[Coat-of-Arms of Quito]](../images/e/ec-p-qca.jpg)
image from website
of the Province of Pichincha
![[Coat-of-Arms of Quito]](../images/e/ec-aman.gif)
image by Ivan Sache, 24 February 2007
The parish of Amaguaña (20,000 inhabitants; 60 sq.
km) belongs to the Metropolitan District of Quito; it is located
in the valley of Chillos, 28 km south-east of Quito, at an
elevation of 2,683 a.s.l.
The origin of the name of Amaguaña is controversial. E. Moreno
Yánez (Nueva Historia del Ecuador) claims that the two main
parishes of the valley are named after their respective caciques
(chiefs), in the north, Sangolquí named after Sangoquiza, in the
south, Amaguaña, named after Amaguañuy. Other say that
Amaguaña means "love" in Aymara. Anyway, the oldest
mention of Amaguaña dates back to 1559, as listed by the
Franciscan monk Agustín Moreno in his "Cien preguntas sobre
los orígenes Franciscanos" (Hundred questions on the
Franciscan origins). In the early years of the Spanish
settlement, Amaguaña was inhabited by "doctrinas"
(native tribes not incorporating into a parish) and colonists,
including Pedro Ampudia, the son of the the founder of Quito.
Teodoro Wolf, Gonzáles Suárez and Aquiles Pérez consistently
reports the eruption of volcano Pichincha in October 1660,
considered as the biggest ever, which causes the flooding of the
valley of Chillos and the opening of the precipice of
Sincholagua. The villagers escaped to the hillsides of the
Pasochoa and Rumiñahui. Accordingly, the inhabitants of the
valleys of Tumbaco and Chillos still believe that the place was
once a big lake.
Amaguaña might have become a civil parish during the first term
of Gabriel García Moreno, 1861-1865. On 29 May 1861, the
National Convention of Ecuador issued the Law on the Territorial
Division, erecting Amaguaña as one of the 47 parishes of the
Canton of Quito, Province of Pichincha. There is, however, no
other decree stating that Amaguaña was already a civil parish,
but there are hints in local archives of the existence of a civil
administration in 1861 and 1863.
The National Park Pasochoa is located close to Amaguaña. It is
made of a sleeping volcano and hosts several endemic or
endangered. During 1996 and 1997, Doris Vela and Violeta Rafael,
from the Pontifical University of Ecuador, collected specimens of
Drosophila (fruit flies) in the western slopes of the
Pasochoa. They described three new species, on e of them being
named D. amaguana, after the parish of Amaguaña (Vela, D.,
Rafael, V. 2004. Three new andean species of Drosophila (Diptera,
Drosophilidae) of the mesophragmatica group. Iheringia. Série
Zoologia 94, 295-299 - available
online.
Maize has been grown in the valley of Chillos since the pre-Inca
period; the valley of Chillos is still known as the land of
maize.
Accordingly, the flag of Amaguaña is horizontally divided
yellow-blue, yellow representing maize and blue representing the
clear sky and the water of the rivers.
Source: Amaguaña
by Enrique V. Carrera.
Ivan Sache, 24 February 2007