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| | Amazon.com: Rough Guide to Ecuador: Books: Harry Ades,Melissa Graham (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18) |
 | | This is the agricultural and indigenous heartland of Ecuador, a region of patchwork fields crawling up the mountainsides, of stately haciendas and dozens of remote communities. |
 | | West of the sierra, the coastal region is formed by a fertile alluvial plain, used for growing tropical crops such as bananas, sugar, coffee and cacao, and bordered on its Pacific seaboard by a string of beaches, mangrove swamps, shrimp farms and ports. |
 | | They are descendants, for the most part, of the various indigenous populations that first inhabited Ecuadors territory, of the Incas who colonized these lands in the late fifteenth century, of the Spaniards who conquered the Inca empire in the 1530s and of the African slaves brought by the Spanish colonists. |
| www.amazon.com /Rough-Guide-Ecuador-Harry-Ades/dp/1858285526 (1701 words) |
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