Plaza de Quito

El Viso divides its streets among the names of American capitals and countries, and this square took that of Ecuador’s capital. The district was built between 1933 and 1936 on one of Madrid’s high points, the “viso” that gives the neighborhood its name: the ground visible from afar. Its layout of low villas gradually arranged a miniature map of the continent Madrid still looked toward. Quito inherits its name from the Quitus, the peoples who occupied the Guayllabamba basin before the arrival of the Incas and the Spanish. The etymology is not settled: one of the most repeated readings translates the place name as “land in the middle of the world,” a sense that fits a city set almost on the equator. In 1534 Sebastián de Belalcázar refounded it as San Francisco de Quito. Plaza de Quito barely reaches a little over a hundred meters among gardens and railings. The sign points to a city perched at some 2,800 meters, among volcanoes, beside the geographic center of the planet.