Hambatus

The Hambatus were an independent people of the fertile Ambato valley in the Ecuadorian Andes, in present-day Tungurahua Province, a region settled for some two thousand years and part of the wider Panzaleo cultural sphere. They had no large cities but lived in farming tribes, each governed by its eldest man, and the Hambatus proper were divided into four local groups alongside Huapante, Puruhá and Panzaleo communities in the same valley.

They were later absorbed into the Inca Empire, and in the wars between Atahualpa and Huáscar the fighting reached their country: around 1530 Atahualpa defeated his half-brother's army near Ambato.

Spanish control followed quickly, when Sebastián de Benalcázar founded the town of Ambato on their lands in 1534. The Panzaleo tongue survived among the valley's indigenous population until the seventeenth century, after which they shifted to Kichwa.