Indian reductions

Indian reductions in the Andes (Spanish:reducciones) were settlements built by Spanish authorities and populated by the forcible relocation of indigenous Andean populations. Beginning in 1569, the viceroy Francisco de Toledo ordered the resettlement of more than one million native people into approximately six hundred of these reducciones. The resettlement was primarily carried out in the Audenicas of Lima and Charcas (modern day Bolivia and Peru, roughly speaking). The specific goals of the campaign are still debated, but there is general agreement that the Spanish authorities sought to consolidate scattered, native populations and place them into a more easily controlled system of grid-based towns. The native populations, who had adapted to a way of life suitable to the many, minor microclimates throughout the Andes, experienced immense hardship in the transition to these new regions. Despite these hardships, certain aspects of native Andean life were fiercely preserved by their own agency, and life in the reductions reflected a complex hybrid of forced Spanish values and those preserved from the older native communities.