Baños is one of those towns where the landscape looms right over you. Streets end against almost vertical green walls, a waterfall is visible from the centre, and at night Tungurahua, a 5.020-metre volcano, is right there behind you even if you can't see it. The town is small, you can walk all of it in an afternoon, and yet it has enough to fill four or five days without repeating yourself: hot springs, waterfalls, viewpoints, suspension bridges and a road that drops from the highlands to the jungle in an hour.
If you're travelling on a tight budget, your money goes a long way in Baños. The municipal hot pools cost US$ 4 per adult, the Pailón del Diablo between US$ 3 and US$ 5 depending on the entrance you choose, and a set lunch at a local eatery is around US$ 2,50 to 3,50. You rent a bike, ride down the Ruta de las Cascadas to Río Verde and come back by pickup truck or bus. The big spending is on adventure: rafting, bridge jumping or a trip into the Amazon.
It is also a place with a history of faith and of fear. The sanctuary of the Virgen del Rosario de Agua Santa has drawn pilgrims for centuries, and every October the town takes to the streets. And the volcano left its mark on everyone: in 1999 the whole population was evacuated and eruptive activity went on until 2016. Today the Instituto Geofísico describes it as at rest, with low seismic activity, and Baños is back to what it always was: a town of hot baths on the edge of the Oriente.
The valley where Baños stands today was called Ipo in the Puruhá language. According to the history published by the municipality itself, the town had no founder and no founding date: it was gradually settled by scattered groups of Panzaleos, Puruháes and Indigenous people from the Oriente, and later by Spaniards and mestizos who traded between the jungle and the highlands. In 1919, 44 skulls and stone and clay objects were found in the San Pedro caves. Around 1585 the chiefdom of Ipo passed to the priest Álvaro Guerrero Zalamea, who is credited with starting devotion to the Virgin and building the first chapel. A chronicle from 1604 already speaks of the 'Asiento de los Baños', with two springs, one hot and one cold, at the foot of a waterfall. On 4 February 1773 came the first historically described eruption of Tungurahua, and between 1916 and 1920 there was another eruptive cycle. Between 1887 and 1909 the Belgian priest Tomás Halflants, who also served as mayor, laid out streets, built bridges and, on 11 February 1904, began the basilica, which was finished in 1944. On 16 December 1944 Baños became a canton. The Ambato earthquake of 5 August 1949 destroyed almost every building. In 1999 Tungurahua reawakened and the town was evacuated completely; the eruptive period, with major episodes in 2006, lasted until the eruption of February 2016. In 2018 the IG-EPN stopped classifying it as 'en erupción' (erupting). Since then Baños has established itself as Ecuador's capital of adventure tourism.
Read the full history ↓The «land of flowers and fruit» in the central Andes: territory of the Hambatos and Panzaleos, dominated by the active Tungurahua volcano, cradle of Ambato and of the «Three Juanes», reborn from the 1949 earthquake, Ecuador's capital of leather and footwear and home to Baños de Agua Santa, the gateway to the Amazon.
Read the history of Tungurahua →Some places make no sense on your own; with someone explaining them, they change completely. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 17 activities in Banos. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before the town we know today existed, the slopes and the valley at the foot of the Tungurahua volcano were inhabited by peoples of Kichwa roots, part of the Andean world of the central highlands of present-day Ecuador. For those communities, the mountain was no mere geographical feature: Tungurahua was a living entity, respected and feared, and the hot water rising from its skirts was a phenomenon loaded with meaning. That water should come up hot out of the ground, smelling of sulfur and tasting of minerals, was read as a manifestation of the volcano's power and of the fertility of the soil.
Those hot springs, volcanic in origin, were probably the first great draw of the place. Tradition credited them with healing and purifying properties, and it is quite possible they were used for health and ritual purposes from pre-Hispanic times. From that geological fact —hot water flowing out of Tungurahua— the town's own name would be born centuries later: 'Baños', the baths.
The valley also held a strategic position: it was one of the natural passes between the Andean highlands and the Amazonian lowlands, a gorge opened by the Pastaza river that linked two very different worlds. That condition of being a border and a corridor, between the Andes and the Oriente, would shape the whole later history of Baños and explains its nickname, 'Puerta del Oriente', the gateway to the east.
With the Spanish conquest and the colonial organization of the Royal Audiencia of Quito that followed, the Baños valley was folded into the network of roads and missions connecting the highlands with the Amazon. Its position in the gorge of the Pastaza river made it an obligatory waypoint for anyone looking to descend from the Andean highlands toward the Oriente, the vast and little-known jungle region.
The religious order that left the deepest mark on the area was the Dominicans. From the colonial period, Dominican missionaries had a significant presence in Baños and used it as a base and gateway for their evangelizing missions among the Amazonian peoples. That link with the order of Saint Dominic left a deep religious imprint on the identity of the place and explains much of its character as a center of faith and pilgrimage.
For centuries, Baños was above all that: a hamlet of passage, of rest and of devotion, where travelers recovered before or after facing the hard route into the jungle, and where pilgrims came for the waters and the shrine. That double condition —a place of transit toward the Amazon and a place of worship— survives today in its nickname 'Puerta del Oriente' and in its importance as a pilgrimage destination for the Ecuadorian highlands and the Oriente.
The religious soul of Baños turns around the Virgin of Nuestra Señora del Agua Santa, its patron saint. The town's Marian devotion is intimately tied to the nature surrounding it: the waterfalls, the hot springs and the volcano. Popular tradition tells of apparitions of the Virgin beside the falls and credits her with a long series of miracles, above all the protection of the inhabitants against the dangers of a setting as powerful as it is unstable.
That relationship between faith and nature took very concrete form in the Basílica de Nuestra Señora del Agua Santa, the neo-Gothic church in the center of town. Large canvases hang inside it that narrate, scene by scene, the miracles attributed to the Virgin: people saved from eruptions of the volcano, from floods, from landslides and from accidents on the roads. More than simple religious paintings, those murals are a visual account of the history of Baños and of the way its people have lived —in fear and in hope— under the shadow of Tungurahua.
Devotion to the Virgin of Agua Santa turned Baños into an important pilgrimage center. The patron saint festivities and the Marian celebrations fill the town with the faithful arriving from all over the highlands and the Oriente, mixing the Catholic faith inherited from the colony with the ancient relationship of Andean communities with water and the mountain. The city's full name, 'Baños de Agua Santa', seals that fusion between thermal water and the sacred for good.
For much of its history, Baños was a small settlement, administratively tied to the city of Ambato and the province of Tungurahua, in the central highlands. Its growth was long constrained by its difficult geography: boxed into a narrow valley, surrounded by mountains and cut off by the Pastaza canyon, it was a relatively isolated place whose main connection to the rest of the country was the roads toward Ambato and the descent route into the Oriente.
The great change came with the improvement of communication routes over the 20th century, especially the construction and upgrading of the highway linking Baños with Puyo, crossing the canyon of the Pastaza river alongside the run of waterfalls that today are its greatest draw. That road not only eased trade and access to the Amazon, it laid the foundations of the town's tourist future by putting within travelers' reach a landscape of waterfalls and jungle that is hard to match.
Administrative recognition followed that growth. Baños gradually gained standing of its own until it became a canton of Tungurahua province in 1944, with its seat in the city of Baños de Agua Santa. Cantonization consolidated the town as the service center for its area and opened the way to the following decades, in which tourism —health, religious and, above all, adventure— would completely transform its economy and its shape.
No account of the history of Baños is complete without the volcano that dominates it. Tungurahua, the 'Gigante Negro', is one of the most active volcanoes in Ecuador, and its shadow has always hung over the city. After several decades of relative calm through the 20th century, the volcano woke again in late 1999, beginning a new and prolonged eruptive period that would change life in Baños.
In 1999, faced with rising activity and the risk of a major eruption, the authorities ordered the evacuation of Baños and the nearby settlements. Thousands of people had to leave their homes and their businesses, in a traumatic episode that tested the whole community. The evacuation and the uncertainty hit the local economy hard, heavily dependent as it is on tourism. In time the inhabitants returned and learned to live with a volcano that, from then on, would remain intermittently active.
Tungurahua had significant eruptive episodes in the years that followed, with a particularly strong one in July and August 2006, which brought ashfall, pyroclastic flows in some ravines and damage to the surrounding settlements (with fatalities in the areas closest to the volcano, above all in Palitahua and other communities on its flanks), and new major pulses in 2008, 2010 and 2013. The last eruptive episode was recorded in February 2016 —pyroclastic flows confined to the upper part of the cone and ash columns, over some 19 days— and with it the long eruptive period begun in 1999 came to a close. Since then, the Instituto Geofísico has kept the volcano at a 'very low' level of activity, and in 2018 it stopped classifying it as 'erupting' and considered it simply 'active'. Baños lived through all those years under permanent monitoring, with evacuation plans and alert systems. Far from giving up, the city showed remarkable resilience: it kept receiving travelers, and even the spectacle of the active volcano —visible at night from the viewpoints— added to its tourist appeal, in a relationship between the town and its mountain as risky as it is fascinating.
Over the last few decades, Baños de Agua Santa went through a deep transformation that turned it into one of the most visited destinations in Ecuador and the country's undisputed capital of adventure tourism. What for centuries was a town of passage, of hot springs and of pilgrimage knew how to use its extraordinary natural conditions —the Pastaza canyon, the run of waterfalls, the mountains, the hot springs and the closeness of the jungle— to reinvent itself as a huge open-air adventure park.
The offering multiplied: rafting on the Pastaza river, canopy and ziplines over the canyon, puenting off the bridges, cycling the famous Ruta de las Cascadas, quad bikes, horseback riding and hiking. On top of that base of adrenaline came icons that traveled the world, such as the 'swing at the end of the world' at the Casa del Árbol, which went viral online and drew travelers from across the planet, or the imposing Pailón del Diablo waterfall. The old hot springs kept playing their part: restorative rest after the adventure.
Today Baños combines all its historical layers in a single experience: the pilgrim praying in the Basílica of the Virgin of Agua Santa, the backpacker crossing the world and basing themselves in its hostels, the Ecuadorian family arriving on a public holiday to bathe in the hot springs and the adventurer riding down to the Pailón del Diablo all coexist in a small, cheerful, vibrant town. Under the permanent gaze of Tungurahua, Baños remains what it always was —a gateway between the Andes and the Amazon, a place of waters and of faith— but projected into the 21st century as one of South America's great nature and adventure destinations.
