🇪🇨 Ecuador · Sierra (Andean Highlands)
Alausí is a picturesque railway town in the province of Chimborazo, in Ecuador's central highlands, at around 2,350 meters above sea level. Its streets of brightly painted houses with wooden balconies, its church and the huge statue of San Pedro watching over it from a hill give it a particular charm, but its worldwide fame comes from something close by: being the starting point of the celebrated Nariz del Diablo, the Devil's Nose train, one of the boldest pieces of railway engineering in the Americas.
The Nariz del Diablo (Cóndor Puñuna) is an imposing, almost vertical rock face down which the Ecuadorian railway managed to descend by means of a system of switchbacks, dropping an enormous height in very little distance. The tourist train that runs this stretch, going down and back up in reverse along rails carved into the mountain, is one of the country's great attractions.
This guide covers the essentials of Alausí: the Devil's Nose train ride (back in service since 2025, though it is worth checking that it is running, since the service has had interruptions), the charm of the town itself, the lookouts and walks around it, and how to get to this emblematic destination on Ecuador's Andean railway route.
Alausí grew to the rhythm of Ecuador's trans-Andean railway, whose construction in the early 20th century had to solve the descent down the steep rock face of the Nariz del Diablo with an ingenious system of switchbacks, a feat of engineering that cost many lives. The train made Alausí a key point on the Quito–Guayaquil line and, later, a tourist destination. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The province of Ecuador's highest volcano and of the point farthest from the center of the Earth: Puruhá land around the ancient Liribamba, cradle of Riobamba —the 'Sultana of the Andes' and seat of the first Constituent Assembly of 1830—, of the Devil's Nose railway and of the vicuña páramo of Chimborazo.
Read the history of Chimborazo →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The modern history of Alausí is inseparable from that of Ecuador's railway. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the country took on a colossal, long-dreamed-of project: building a rail line to link the capital, Quito, high in the highlands, with the main port, Guayaquil, on the coast. The project, pushed hard during the government of president Eloy Alfaro, aimed to knit together a country deeply divided by its geography, connecting the Andean highlands with the coastal plain.
The great challenge was topographic. The railway had to climb the steep Andes, overcoming enormous height differences over short distances, across terrain of canyons, dizzying slopes and unstable ground. The construction, in the hands of engineers —many of them foreign— and thousands of workers, was a titanic undertaking that faced extreme conditions: the weather, tropical diseases in the lowlands, landslides and the harshness of the relief.
Within that heroic route, one point became the symbol of the whole work and its greatest challenge: the descent down a steep rock face known as the Nariz del Diablo, the Devil's Nose. Working out how to take the rails down it tested every ounce of the builders' ingenuity and became the most famous —and most tragic— page in the history of the Ecuadorian railway.
The Nariz del Diablo is an imposing, almost vertical rocky promontory that stood in the railway's way. Taking a train down a wall like that was, in principle, impossible: no locomotive could descend head-on a slope that steep. The solution, bold and brilliant, was to build a system of zigzags (also called 'switchbacks'): a series of Z-shaped stretches of track, so that the train runs to the end of one stretch, the crew throws the points, and the locomotive reverses down the next stretch, dropping step by step down the face of the mountain.
Cutting those rails into the living rock of the cliff was extraordinarily dangerous work. Building this stretch, carried out in the first decades of the 20th century, cost the lives of many workers, among them a great many laborers brought in for the hard graft. Popular legend —and the chilling name of the place— capture that mixture of feat and sacrifice: taming the 'Nariz del Diablo' came at a very high cost in human lives.
Once finished, the Nariz del Diablo stretch became a marvel of railway engineering, admired around the world, and a symbol of the determination with which Ecuador managed to join its highlands and its coast by rail. Alausí, sitting at the top of that descent, was bound forever to the feat.
The arrival of the railway transformed Alausí. From being one more highland town, it became an important stop on the Quito–Guayaquil line and a hub of activity tied to the train. The station, the railway workers and the movement of passengers and freight gave the town its life, and its architecture of colorful houses with wooden balconies reflects that boom period.
As the decades passed, the Ecuadorian railway declined in the face of road transport, and many lines stopped running as regular transport. The appeal of the Nariz del Diablo stretch, however, found a second life in tourism: the train ride down the switchbacks of the rock face became one of the most sought-after tourist experiences in Ecuador, drawing travelers from all over the world to Alausí. At various stages the line was rehabilitated as a tourist train, with Sibambe station fitted out at the foot of the cliff.
The running of the tourist train, though, has been irregular, with spells of suspension for financial and management reasons, so it is always worth checking whether it is operating. Beyond the train, Alausí keeps its charm as a railway town, presided over by the statue of San Pedro and surrounded by Andean landscapes, a living testimony to the epic of the railway that once joined the highlands and the coast of Ecuador.
The most recent chapter in the history of Alausí has been marked by the changing fortunes of its train. After the railway declined as regular transport in the second half of the 20th century, the Ecuadorian state decided, once into the 21st century, to rehabilitate emblematic stretches as tourist attractions. The state company Ferrocarriles del Ecuador (FEEP) invested in restoring stations, locomotives and track, and the Nariz del Diablo stretch became the flagship of that tourist network, with Sibambe station fitted out at the foot of the cliff and cultural performances by the Puruhá communities.
Through the 2010s, the Nariz del Diablo tourist train enjoyed years of splendor, welcoming travelers from around the world and driving the economy of Alausí. In 2020, however, Ferrocarriles del Ecuador was put into liquidation over financial problems, made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the service was suspended. The closure hit Alausí hard, since its economy depended in good measure on the flow of tourists arriving by train.
On top of that crisis came, in March 2023, a tragedy unrelated to the railway: a huge landslide (one of the country's worst recent disasters) hit part of the canton and left many dead, marking the community deeply. Against that difficult backdrop, national and local authorities worked on rehabilitating the stretch: in 2024 the Ministerio de Infraestructura y Transporte and the municipality of Alausí signed an agreement to bring the 12 km of track back into use, and in July 2025 the train ran again. Even so, operation has remained irregular, with fresh suspensions for safety works, which reflects how hard it is to sustain a heritage as valuable as it is fragile.