The Pastos are an indigenous American ethnic group, who lived together with the Quillacingas in the Andean strip of what is currently the department of Nariño, in the south of Colombia, and the province of Carchi, in the north of Ecuador.
The name pasture could be a Spanish adaptation of pasto awáo 'scorpion people'. The pastures were under the domination of the Inca Empire, shortly before the arrival of the Spanish. In the last decade of the 15th century, the pastures faced the Linca Huayna Capac, who from Quito decided to launch a campaign to conquer the pasture territory. It is possible that pasto awá, which means 'scorpion people', is an image that arose to refer that Huayna Cápacles "wanted to step on the head and they stung him with the tail", since when the empire occupied the area of present-day Piales, the pastures took refuge in the western mountain range and managed to expel the occupants. The Incas then preferred to advance through the Amazon foothills through the territory of the Cofán, but finally it was the Spanish who controlled the region and it was the Awá people who managed to preserve themselves from domination in the jungles of the Colombian Pacific slope, while the grasses finally stopped speaking their language.
