Detail of a printed map shows text in Spanish reading "La Puna" and other labels over landmarks.
Detail of a printed map shows text in Spanish reading "Indios de la Nacion de Maynas." Rivers, small bodies of water, and forests are also included in the map.
Detail of a printed map shows decorative cartouche includes angels and text in Spanish that indicates the map's title.

Carta de la Provincia de Quito y sus Adjacentes

Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville
1750

Printed maps based on direct eyewitness observation in eighteenth-century Spanish America are relatively rare, but this highly detailed map of the Audiencia de Quito has a special history. It was based on the observations of Riobamba native Pedro Vicente Maldonado and confected in the workshop of French cartographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, with the assistance of d’Anville’s Parisian colleague – and famed South American explorer – Charles-Marie de la Condamine. The four sheets joined together show a region stretching from the Pacific coastline across the Andes and into the Amazonian interior, replete with numerous notes relating to indigenous populations, both historical and contemporary, as well as some sites of archaeological and geographical prominence. Acquired by the Library in 2014, it joins an extensive swathe of South American maps that cut across Amazonian and Andean landscapes in the colonial era.

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