The Colonial Period
With Honduras under control, the Spanish increasingly focused their attention on the int-erior of the country, in large part because of the inhospitable climate of the coastal settlements and their vulnerability to pirate attacks. Discovery of gold in the Valle de Comayagua in 1539, and of silver at Goascoran and around Tegucigalpa over the following forty years, seemed to promise untold riches. The designation of Comayagua as capital in 1573 reflected the displacement of economic activity away from the coast. For the indigenous inhabitants, the consolidation of Spanish power was catastrophic. Contemporary population records are notoriously inaccurate, but from an estimated 400,000 in 1524, the population probably fell to as low as 15,000 by 1571. Those who survived the diseases of the Old World were initially enslaved and shipped either overseas or into the mines. Social structures collapsed and communities were forcibly dispersed, with the highland tribes being most affected, since they had the greatest contact with the colonists. Incredibly, considering their impact, the number of colonists numbered fewer than 300 throughout the seventeenth century. For the Spanish the steep decline in population was above all else a severe hindrance to economic development. Though at their peak the mines provided a comfortable living for their owners, from the seventeenth century onwards the labour shortage made working deeper seams impracticable, and profits dropped sharply as a result. The depopulation of the countryside also hindered the development of a sustainable agricultural sector. Encomienda , the system of demanding labour and tribute from the indigenous population, theoretically ensured a supply of workers; in practice, labour scarcity meant that food production rarely rose above subsistence levels, capable only of supplying immediate local needs. By the early 1800s, the Honduran economy was in crisis. Mining was virtually defunct and a series of severe droughts hit both agriculture and livestock. Society was sharply divided, with a thin layer of the relatively wealthy - state functionaries, merchants, a handful of mine and hacienda owners - above a poor mass of mestizos and indigenous peoples. A middle class was nonexistent and any kind of unifying national infrastructure absent; by independence in 1821, Honduras still had no national printing press, newspapers or university
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