It was doubtless because of its already high status that Quito was chosen by the Spaniards as the capital of their newly acquired territory, as they pushed the Conquest north from Peru following their defeat of the Incas . On August 28, 1534 San Francisco de Quito was founded on its present site with SebastiA?n de BenalcA?zar as its governor, who established the proper workings of a city - appointing two mayors and a town council - on December 6 that year. With great speed, the main squares and streets were marked out, and lots were granted to the 204 colonists who'd come to settle here, on the condition that they build solid houses on them or risk losing their land. It wasn't long before the main religious orders had moved in, too, including the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Augustinians and the Sisters of Mercy, all of whom immediately set to work building their own churches and monasteries (using Indian labour). Within thirty years, the Cathedral had been built, the main streets had been paved with stone, irrigation channels were supplying the city with water, and the council had established slaughter houses (governed by strict hygiene rules) and markets, whose prices it regulated. Work continued apace and by the end of the sixteenth century most of the great churches, monasteries and public buildings were in place, making Quito one of the great cities of Spanish America.

During the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was no real departure from the model that had been established in the city's first few decades: more houses were built, more churches sprang up and modest public works were undertaken. The population increased but not dramatically so - by 1780 Quito was home to just 25,000 inhabitants (a figure already reached by Lima, Peru, in 1610). Indeed, despite being capital of a colonial administrative division (known as a Real Audiencia) that roughly corresponded to modern-day Ecuador, Quito remained something of a backwater; little of import took place here, and the city's quiet pace of life was interrupted only by petty quarrels and rivalries amongst the clerics, Creoles and public officials. This sleepy state of affairs was brought to an abrupt end, however, in the early nineteenth century , as the tide of revolution swept over the continent. Most of the important events marking Ecuador's struggle for independence took place in or around Quito, and in 1830 the city found itself capital of the newly declared Republic of Ecuador , the seat of national government, congress and the supreme court. The following decades saw a flurry of activity in Quito: prestigious public buildings like the Teatro Sucre and the astronomical observatory were erected; statues of Independence heroes were installed in the main squares; bridges were built; more streets outside the centre were paved; and running water was brought directly to many houses, among numerous other projects. Nonetheless, growth was still slow and by the end of the nineteenth century Quito's population stood at just 50,000.

As Quito entered the twentieth century it was finally outgrowing the area laid out over three hundred years earlier and was slowly beginning to extend north and south of the Casco Colonial. The construction of new buildings became easier with the arrival of the Quito-Guayaquil railway in 1909, which was able to transport heavy building materials and new machinery to the capital. Yet even by 1945, there'd still been little fundamental change in the look and shape of Quito since its earliest days: the city's wealthy families still lived in the colonial centre, which, with the exception of the new working class barrio growing up around the railway station to the south, was for the most part still surrounded by farms and open countryside. All this changed dramatically in the postwar years, fuelled initially by the banana boom of the 1940s. Suddenly Ecuador was an important export country, and finally had the resources to pay for new infrastructure in its capital, such as hospitals, schools, universities, prisons and an airport. When the city's wealthy families uprooted from the centre and moved north to the fashionable new barrio of Mariscal Sucre, it was clear that Quito's geography was undergoing a fundamental change. With Ecuador's petrol boom of the 1970s, more cash became available for the construction of high-rise offices and new public buildings such as ministries, courts and the Palacio Legislativo, as well as new residential districts. This was accompanied by an explosion in the population, which passed the one-million mark in 1990 - caused in part by the migration of workers from the countryside to the capital. Meanwhile, Quito's boundaries have been spreading further and further from the centre, literally stretching the city's resources to their limit. Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century , Quito's growth in population and area show no signs of slowing down, putting an ever-greater strain on housing, employment, transport and even services like sanitation and water supplies.