Population
In 2004 the department was recorded as having 745,805 inhabitants. The inhabitants are divided between three principal ethnicities; Ladino, K'iche' Maya and Mam Maya. Three languages are spoken in the department, broadly corresponding to the ethnic groups; Spanish, K'iche' and Mam. In 2004, 40.4% of the population was listed as non-indigenous (i.e. Ladino) and 59.6% as indigenous (mainly K'iche' and Mam). In 1999, average life expectancy was calculated as 63.7 years. In the same year, 63.7% of dwellings had electricity, 70.1% had drinking water and 92.5% had sanitation.
Each municipality is known for its different traditional indigenous dress, with the exceptions of Coatepeque, Colomba, Flores Costa Cuca and San Carlos Sija, where traditional clothing is not worn by the indigenous inhabitants. These trajes are manufactured by the local inhabitants themselves.
Read more about this topic: Quetzaltenango Department
Famous quotes containing the word population:
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It was a time of madness, the sort of mad-hysteria that always presages war. There seems to be nothing left but war—when any population in any sort of a nation gets violently angry, civilization falls down and religion forsakes its hold on the consciences of human kind in such times of public madness.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)
“A multitude of little superfluous precautions engender here a population of deputies and sub-officials, each of whom acquits himself with an air of importance and a rigorous precision, which seemed to say, though everything is done with much silence, “Make way, I am one of the members of the grand machine of state.””
—Marquis De Custine (1790–1857)