Ecuadorians

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Ecuadorians
Ecuatorianos

Flag of Ecuador; symbol of Ecuadorian unity
Total population
c. 18.5 million (Diaspora) c. 1.5m
Regions with significant populations
Ecuador 17.8 million (2021 est.)[1][2]
United States	717,995[3]
Spain	444,347 [4][5]
Italy	66,590[6]
Chile	42,022[7]
Canada	25,410[8]
Germany	16,000[9]
Colombia	11,404[10]
France	10,249[11]
United Kingdom	9,422[12]
Peru	8,000[13]
Sweden	2,627[14]
Brazil	2,000[13]
Mexico	3,000[13]
Australia	3,000[13]
Japan	2,000[13]
Languages
Ecuadorian Spanish, Amerindian languages
Religion
Predominantly Roman Catholic; Protestant[15]
Related ethnic groups
Other Latin Americans, Indigenous people of the Americas, Europeans

Ecuadorians (Spanish: ecuatorianos) are people identified with the South American country of Ecuador. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Ecuadorians, several (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their being Ecuadorian.

Numerous indigenous cultures inhabited what is now Ecuadorian territory for several millennia before the expansion of the Inca Empire in the fifteenth century. The Las Vegas culture of coastal Ecuador is one of the oldest cultures in the Americas. The Valdivia culture is another well-known early Ecuadorian culture. Spaniards arrived in the sixteenth century, as did sub-Saharan Africans who were enslaved and transported across the Atlantic by Spaniards and other Europeans. The modern Ecuadorian population is principally descended from these three ancestral groups.

As of the 2022 census, 77.5% of the population identified as "Mestizos", a mix of Spanish and Indigenous American ancestry, up from 71.9% in 2000. The percentage of the population which identifies as "white" was 2.2%, which fell from 6.1% in 2010 and 10.5% in 2000.^[16] Amerindians account for 7.7% of the population and 4.8% of the population consists of Afro-Ecuadorians.^{[17] [18]} Other statistics put the Mestizo population at 55% to 65% and the indigenous population at 25%.^[19] Genetic research indicates that the ancestry of Ecuadorian Mestizos is predominantly Indigenous.^[20]