Latin American History: Facts That Surprise People

Latin American history tends to get compressed into two chapters: ancient civilisations, then conquest. What gets lost in between is how sophisticated the first was and how contested the second remains.

Before 1492

• The Maya developed a calendar of remarkable accuracy and used the concept of zero centuries before it reached Europe.
• The Aztecs built Tenochtitlán on an island in a lake — a city of canals and causeways, on the site of modern Mexico City.
• The Inca ran an empire down the spine of the Andes, connected by thousands of kilometres of stone roads and rope bridges, without the wheel or a writing system as we would recognise it.
• Machu Picchu was built in the 15th century and was never found by the Spanish.

Independence

Most of Spanish-speaking Latin America broke away in the early 1800s, within a couple of decades of each other. Simón Bolívar campaigned from the north, José de San Martín from the south, and the two met at Guayaquil in 1822 — a famously private conversation after which San Martín withdrew from public life.

Bolívar’s ambition was a single unified republic. Gran Colombia, which briefly joined Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Panama, was the attempt. It fell apart within a decade, and the continent settled into the borders we know now.

What the world took from it

Maize, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, vanilla, chilli. It is difficult to overstate this: remove crops domesticated in the Americas and you remove Italian tomato sauce, Belgian chocolate, Irish potatoes and most of the world’s hot sauce. The kitchens of Europe and Asia were rebuilt around plants from this continent.

Worth remembering the next time a quiz asks where chocolate comes from.