Long before the Europeans arrived, what is today Ecuador was inhabited by an enormous variety of peoples going back to the most ancient American prehistory. On the Santa Elena peninsula, the Las Vegas culture left, some 10,000 years ago, the so-called 'Lovers of Sumpa', one of the oldest human burials on the continent. On that root there flourished, from around 3800 BC, the Valdivia culture, on the coast of Santa Elena and Manabí: maker of the oldest pottery in the Americas and famous for its female figurines, the 'Venus of Valdivia', a symbol of fertility. It was followed on the Coast by the Machalilla, Chorrera, Bahía, Jama-Coaque and La Tolita cultures and, finally, by the Manteño-Huancavilca, great navigators who on wooden rafts traded along the Pacific the coveted spondylus, the sacred red shell of the Andes.
In the Sierra there prospered advanced farming cultures that mastered the use of the ecological tiers: the Cañari in the south, around present-day Azuay and Cañar, who left the ceremonial center that the Incas would later turn into Ingapirca; the Puruhá in Chimborazo; the Panzaleo in the center; and the Quitu and Caranqui in the north, around the valley of Quito and Imbabura. Their lordships traded between the coast, the highlands and the jungle through the figure of the 'mindalá', the specialized merchant who traveled the Andean tiers.
In the Amazon lived —and still live— peoples such as the Amazonian Kichwa, the Shuar, the Achuar, the Waorani, the Siona, the Secoya, the Cofán, the Sápara and the Tsáchila of the western foothills. Far from the old idea of an empty jungle, recent finds in the Upano valley have revealed that there, more than two thousand years ago, extensive cities existed with platforms, plazas and roads. This ethnic and ecological diversity, forged over millennia, is the basis of the plurinational identity that Ecuador recognizes today in its Constitution.
At the end of the 15th century, the Inca Empire —the Tahuantinsuyo, with its capital in Cuzco— expanded northward and incorporated, after hard and drawn-out wars, the territories of today's Ecuadorian Sierra. Resistance was fierce, above all in the north: the conquest of the Caranqui and the Cayambe culminated, around the beginning of the 16th century, in a massacre beside a lake in Imbabura that has been called ever since Yahuarcocha, the 'lake of blood'. The Inca Huayna Cápac, who led those campaigns, made Tomebamba —today's Cuenca, on the old Cañari Guapondélig— and Quito major centers of the empire, and out of the fusion of the Andean peoples with the power of Cuzco a northern nobility was born.
On the death of Huayna Cápac, around 1527, a civil war over the succession broke out between his sons Huáscar, based in Cuzco, and Atahualpa, based in Quito. The conflict, bloody and devastating, dragged on until 1532, when Atahualpa defeated his brother at the battle of Quipaipán. But that victory came at the worst possible moment: the empire was left divided, exhausted and battered as well by the epidemics of European origin —smallpox and measles— that ran ahead of the conquistadors.
At that very moment, in November 1532, a handful of Spaniards under the command of Francisco Pizarro captured Atahualpa at Cajamarca. Despite the fabulous ransom of gold and silver that the Inca handed over, Pizarro had him executed in 1533. With the death of the last great Inca of the north, the door opened to the conquest of his dominions, including the land that is Ecuador today.
The conquest of the north of the extinct empire was led by Sebastián de Benalcázar (or Belalcázar), Pizarro's lieutenant, who in February 1534 set out from San Miguel de Piura toward Quito with a small army of horsemen and foot soldiers joined by thousands of indigenous allies, among them the Cañari, resentful of Atahualpa for the massacres he had ordered against them during the civil war. As he advanced through the Sierra, Benalcázar ran into the resistance of general Rumiñahui, the great chieftain of Quito loyal to Atahualpa.
Rumiñahui fought battles such as Tiocajas and, rather than hand the city and its treasure over to the invaders, burned Quito to the ground. On those ashes, on December 6, 1534, San Francisco de Quito was refounded. Rumiñahui, captured shortly afterwards, was tortured and executed without revealing where the treasures lay; he is remembered to this day as a symbol of Ecuadorian indigenous resistance. In 1534 Santiago de Quito had also been founded, briefly, next to Riobamba.
The occupation of the rest of the territory was slow. Santiago de Guayaquil, after several attempts frustrated by the resistance of the Huancavilca, was definitively founded in 1547 as the great port of the Pacific. In 1541, from the Amazonian east, the expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro and Francisco de Orellana set out in search of the legendary 'Land of Cinnamon'; lost in the jungle, it ended up making, in 1542, the first European descent of the river that Orellana named the Amazon. The vast Oriente, however, would remain for centuries almost outside colonial control, in the hands of missionaries and of the peoples of the jungle themselves.
In 1563, the Spanish crown created the Royal Audiencia of Quito, the administrative unit that —with its shifting borders, which came to stretch from Pasto and Popayán to Piura and the Amazon— is the direct forerunner of today's Ecuador. It depended successively on the Viceroyalty of Peru and on the Viceroyalty of New Granada. For almost three centuries, the colonial economy of the Sierra revolved around the textile obrajes, workshops where the indigenous population, subjected to the mita and to very harsh working conditions, produced cloth and fabrics that were sold throughout the viceroyalty; the Coast, by contrast, lived off cocoa, fishing and trade, and Guayaquil became the great shipyard of the south Pacific.
Quito was, above all, an extraordinary artistic and religious center. The so-called Quito School of painting and sculpture, active between the 16th and 18th centuries, fused European technique with indigenous sensibility in a process of mestizaje and syncretism. Out of its workshops —with figures such as Bernardo de Legarda or the brilliant Manuel Chili, 'Caspicara'— came masterpieces of American baroque that were exported to other colonies and even reached the court in Madrid. Its legacy can be seen in churches such as La Compañía de Jesús, covered in gold leaf, and San Francisco, which make the historic center of Quito the best preserved in Latin America.
Colonial life was not placid. Rebellions such as those of the Estancos and the Alcabalas, and above all the great Rebellion of the Barrios of Quito in 1765 against Spanish taxes, announced Creole discontent. And between 1736 and 1744 the French Geodesic Mission —with scientists such as Charles Marie de La Condamine, Pierre Bouguer and Louis Godin, accompanied by the Quiteño Pedro Vicente Maldonado— arrived in the Audiencia to measure the arc of the terrestrial meridian at the equatorial line and to confirm the flattening of the Earth at the poles. From those measurements, taken at the foot of the volcanoes, would come, centuries later, the name of the country.
The Ecuadorian emancipation process had an early and celebrated milestone: on August 10, 1809, a group of Quito Creoles deposed the president of the Audiencia, Manuel Ruiz de Castilla, and formed a Sovereign Governing Junta presided over by Juan Pío Montúfar, marquis of Selva Alegre. That 'First Cry of Independence' is considered by Ecuadorian historiography one of the first in Spanish America and earned Quito the title of 'Light of America'. But the junta was short-lived: the royalist reaction crushed it, and on August 2, 1810, when the people tried to free the imprisoned patriots, their leaders were massacred, leaving a deep wound.
Definitive independence came a decade later, and it came above all from the Coast. On October 9, 1820, Guayaquil proclaimed itself a free city and organized an army of its own to liberate the Sierra. After years of campaigns and setbacks, the feat was crowned on May 24, 1822, when marshal Antonio José de Sucre, Simón Bolívar's lieutenant, defeated the royalists of general Melchor Aymerich at the battle of Pichincha, fought on the slopes of the volcano that towers over Quito. That victory sealed the freedom of the whole Audiencia.
In July 1822, at the historic Guayaquil Conference, Bolívar and José de San Martín discussed alone the fate of South America; shortly afterwards San Martín withdrew from the scene and left Bolívar to finish the war. The old territory of the Audiencia was incorporated as the Department of the South into Gran Colombia, the great Bolivarian State that brought together present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Panama and Ecuador. Guayaquil, which had dreamed of full independence, was annexed by Bolívar to that continental project.
Gran Colombia, strained by regional rivalries and by the ambitions of the caudillos, fell apart between 1830 and 1831. On May 13, 1830, an assembly of notables gathered in Quito proclaimed the separation of the Department of the South, and in August and September of that year a Constituent Congress meeting in Riobamba —the 'Sultana of the Andes'— drafted the first Constitution and named the Venezuelan general Juan José Flores as first president. The new State took the name 'Ecuador' from the equinoctial line that crosses it. A fragile country was born, divided between regions, with barely half a million inhabitants and deep inequalities inherited from the colony.
The Ecuadorian 19th century was marked by the tension between two projects and two cities: highland Quito, conservative, Catholic and landowning, and coastal Guayaquil, liberal, commercial and open to the world. After the decades of 'floreanismo' and of unstable governments, the dominant figure was Gabriel García Moreno, president in different stretches between 1861 and 1875. He embodied an ambitious conservative and Catholic project: he modernized the State and the administration, promoted education —bringing in religious orders to found schools—, science (he created the Astronomical Observatory and the Polytechnic) and public works, and began the highway and the railway.
García Moreno governed, however, with an iron hand and a theocratic vision: he officially consecrated the Republic to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and signed a Concordat that tied the State closely to the Church, which earned him both devotion and ferocious hatred. On August 6, 1875, at the entrance to the Government Palace in Quito, he was murdered with machete blows and gunshots by a group of conspirators headed by the Colombian Faustino Rayo, in one of the most shocking assassinations in Ecuadorian history.
The assassination of García Moreno did not immediately put an end to conservative predominance, but it opened the way to a long struggle between Catholic highlanders and coastal liberals that was settled by arms. On June 5, 1895, in Guayaquil, the Liberal Revolution broke out and brought to power Eloy Alfaro, the 'Old Fighter', a montonero from Manabí hardened by years of guerrilla warfare and exile. Coastal liberalism transformed the State from its foundations: it separated Church and State and established secularism, free public education, the civil registry, civil marriage and divorce, and it expropriated a good part of the Church's property, in a cultural revolution that still defines contemporary Ecuador.
The great material work of alfarismo was the trans-Andean railway that linked Guayaquil with Quito, completed in 1908 after decades of labor. It was a feat of engineering that included the dizzying stretch of the Devil's Nose, where the tracks climb an almost vertical wall by a system of zigzags; its construction cost countless lives, many of them of Jamaican laborers, but for the first time it physically integrated the Coast and the Sierra and speeded up trade and modernization.
The Liberal Revolution, however, devoured its own children. Pitted against the liberal faction of Leónidas Plaza, Alfaro was arrested and taken to Quito, where on January 28, 1912 a mob stormed the prison and murdered him along with his comrades. Their bodies were dragged through the streets and burned in El Ejido park, in the episode that history remembers as the 'Barbaric Bonfire'. With Alfaro fell the heroic cycle of liberalism; power passed to a coastal banking and agro-exporting plutocracy, in the stage known as plutocratic liberalism.
The economy of Ecuador at the beginning of the 20th century depended on cocoa, the 'golden bean' that made the fortune of the Guayaquil bourgeoisie. The collapse of cocoa prices in the 1920s, together with blights, set off a deep social crisis that culminated in the Julian revolution of 1925 and in the massacre of Guayaquil workers in 1922. In mid-century a new boom —that of bananas— made Ecuador the world's leading exporter of the fruit and transformed the Coast, drawing internal migration and opening up new farmland.
Politics, by contrast, was chronically unstable, and its emblematic figure was José María Velasco Ibarra, five times president between 1934 and 1972 and as many times overthrown before finishing his term, an overwhelming orator who summed up the volatility of the country. In 1941, amid that fragility, war broke out with Peru: the poorly equipped Ecuadorian army was defeated, and the Rio de Janeiro Protocol of 1942 forced Ecuador to cede tens of thousands of square kilometers of Amazonian territory. The wound was so deep that in 1960 Velasco Ibarra went so far as to declare the protocol null, and the phrase 'Ecuador has been, is and will be an Amazonian country' became a national motto.
The border dispute with Peru remained open for decades, with new clashes such as the Cenepa War in 1995, in the Cordillera del Cóndor, until finally the Brasilia Peace Accords, signed in 1998, closed the conflict and drew a definitive border. Meanwhile, at the beginning of the 1970s, the country was entering the era that would change its economy forever: that of oil.
In 1967, the Texaco-Gulf consortium discovered oil in the northeastern Amazon, near present-day Lago Agrio. Production began in 1972, the same year in which a new military dictatorship, headed by general Guillermo Rodríguez Lara, took power with a 'nationalist and revolutionary' discourse. Oil became overnight the State's main source of income: crude prices multiplied after the world crisis of 1973, and a shower of resources financed roads, schools, hospitals and rapid urbanization. But it also tied the economy to a volatile commodity, put the country into debt and left an enormous environmental liability in the jungle and in the indigenous territories of the Oriente.
After the parenthesis of a military triumvirate, in 1979 Ecuador returned to democracy with the election of Jaime Roldós Aguilera, a young reformist president who championed the defense of human rights in the middle of the era of the Southern Cone dictatorships. His death in a plane crash in 1981, still surrounded by suspicion, cut that hope short. He was followed by governments of different stripes that had to cope with the foreign debt crisis that struck all of Latin America in the 1980s.
The 1990s brought a new and decisive actor: the indigenous movement. In 1990, a great uprising organized by CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) paralyzed the country and put the demands for land, dignity and recognition of a plurinational State at the center of the national agenda. From then on, the indigenous movement would become a force capable of bringing down governments and of rewriting the Constitution.
The end of the 20th century was devastating. A combination of falling oil prices, the El Niño event of 1997-1998 that swept the Coast, a deregulated banking system and erratic management led to the worst economic crisis in Ecuadorian history. In 1999, the government of Jamil Mahuad decreed a 'bank holiday' that froze the deposits of millions of people; dozens of banks went under, the sucre collapsed —it went from about 4,000 to 25,000 to the dollar— and inflation soared. The ruin pushed hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians to emigrate, above all to Spain, Italy and the United States, in the largest diaspora in their history.
On January 9, 2000, in a desperate attempt to halt the collapse, Mahuad announced the replacement of the sucre by the United States dollar as the official currency. The measure did not prevent his fall: a few days later, an indigenous uprising led by CONAIE, together with a group of soldiers headed by colonel Lucio Gutiérrez, overthrew him. His vice president, Gustavo Noboa, took power and completed dollarization, which —despite having been born of a tragedy— ended up giving a degree of price stability and survived every later government.
Those years were ones of extreme instability: between 1996 and 2006 no president managed to finish his term. Abdalá Bucaram was removed by Congress in 1997; Mahuad fell in 2000; and Lucio Gutiérrez himself, elected president in 2002, was overthrown in 2005 by the 'rebellion of the forajidos' in Quito. The indigenous movement, urban protests and a volatile Congress had become the arbiters of power, in an exhausted country looking for a way out of the crisis.
In 2007 Rafael Correa took office, an economist who channeled the weariness with the old partidocracia under the banner of the 'Citizens' Revolution'. His government pushed through a new Constitution, approved by referendum in 2008, which defined Ecuador as a plurinational and intercultural State, incorporated the Andean principle of 'good living' (sumak kawsay) and was a world pioneer in recognizing nature —the Pachamama— as a subject of rights. Financed by a new boom in oil prices, Correa's decade brought heavy public investment in roads, hydroelectric plants, schools and hospitals, and a notable reduction of poverty and inequality.
'Correísmo' had its flip side as well: growing concentration of power, tensions with the press, with the indigenous and environmentalist movements, and an economy ever more dependent on crude and on debt to China. The emblem of those contradictions was the Yasuní: after proposing to the world that the oil be left underground in exchange for compensation, the government ended up authorizing its extraction, until a popular referendum in 2023 decided to keep the crude of the ITT block beneath the jungle. In 2017, Correa's chosen successor, Lenín Moreno, broke with his mentor and turned toward austerity and market opening, which in October 2019 set off a violent social explosion led by CONAIE against the elimination of fuel subsidies.
Recent years have been grim. The covid-19 pandemic hit Guayaquil brutally in 2020, with images of corpses in the streets that traveled around the world. And, above all, Ecuador —turned into a corridor for cocaine between Colombia and the Pacific— sank into an unprecedented security crisis: the homicide rate shot up, the prisons became battlefields for drug-trafficking gangs, and in January 2024 president Daniel Noboa declared an 'internal armed conflict' and put the army on the streets. Today Ecuador remains a country of extraordinary contrasts —from the Mitad del Mundo to Darwin's Galápagos, from the Andes to the Amazon— seeking its way between the incomparable wealth of its nature and its culture and the persistent fragility of its economy, its politics and its peace.
The 24 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
The territory of Azuay was the heartland of the Cañari people, one of the most important and warlike cultures of the Ecuadorian Andes, whose main settlement in the valley was called Guapondélig. The Cañari resisted Inca expansion tenaciously, but towards the end of the 15th century they were incorporated into the Tahuantinsuyo.
The Inca Túpac Yupanqui, and later his son Huayna Cápac, raised there Tomebamba, a splendid city that aspired to rival Cuzco and where, according to tradition, Huayna Cápac himself was born. Its ruins, today in the Pumapungo complex —'the gate of the puma'—, in the middle of Cuenca, bear witness to that imperial splendor in the north of the Andean world.
On the site of ancient Tomebamba, on April 12, 1557, Gil Ramírez Dávalos founded Santa Ana de los Ríos de Cuenca, following the strict rules of grid layout laid down by Charles V. Crossed by four rivers —the Tomebamba, the Yanuncay, the Tarqui and the Machángara—, the city grew with a remarkable architectural harmony of houses with colored façades, flower-filled courtyards, domes and churches.
That urban ensemble, which keeps its founding plan after four centuries, earned its historic center the declaration in 1999 as a Unesco World Cultural Heritage Site. Cuenca is today the country's third city and a cultural, university and fine-arts reference point in Ecuador.
Azuay and neighboring Cañar are the cradle of the genuine toquilla straw hat, woven by hand from a fine plant fiber and known around the world —mistakenly— as the 'Panama hat', because it became popular among the workers and travelers of the Panama Canal in the early 20th century, when it was one of Ecuador's great exports.
The traditional weaving of the hat was declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by Unesco in 2012. The province is also famous for its goldsmithing, its pottery, its furniture making and a rich tradition of crafts that supports many communities of the austro.
West of Cuenca, Cajas National Park protects a high-altitude páramo strewn with more than two hundred glacial lakes, dwarf polylepis forests (the 'paper trees') and a singular fauna of condors, llamas and deer. Besides its natural value, El Cajas supplies the city with water and is a paradise for hiking and trout fishing.
The park forms part, together with the historic center of Cuenca, of a territory that combines nature and culture, and through it ran the old Qhapaq Ñan, the great Inca road that linked the empire from north to south.
Today Azuay combines its colonial heritage, its strong cultural identity and a diversified economy of crafts, industry, services and trade. Cuenca has also become one of the favorite destinations for foreign retirees —above all from the United States— for its mild climate, its heritage and its quality of life.
The province also carries a deep history of migration: since the end of the 20th century, thousands of people from Azuay and Cañar emigrated to the United States and to Spain, and remittances transformed whole towns of the austro, leaving a visible mark on its economy, its architecture and its social life.
The province of Bolívar, in the center of the Sierra, has as its capital Guaranda, the 'City of the Seven Hills', a quiet Andean town of colonial tradition and steep streets watched over by Chimborazo. The region was anciently peopled by the Chimbo and the Waranka (Guaranga), communities of the central Andes related to the Puruhá, organized in lordships that came together in assembly for common affairs and that were later incorporated into the Inca Empire.
During the colony the corregimiento of Chimbo was established, and Guaranda grew as the commercial head town of the area towards the end of the 18th century. Along its roads passed the mule trains that linked Guayaquil with Quito before the railway —the famous 'vía Flores'—, which gave the province the role of a crossroads and an identity as a land of muleteers and of farmers of fertile valleys, an obligatory passage between the Sierra and the Coast.
Guaranda is famous for celebrating the best-known and most traditional carnival in Ecuador, a festival of Andean and mestizo roots that draws visitors from all over the country and beyond. For several days the city fills with satirical coplas, parades, music, dances and the inevitable games of water, flour and talcum powder, in an atmosphere of overflowing joy presided over by the legendary figure of the 'Taita Carnaval', the great festive symbol of the province.
The emblematic drink of the celebration is the 'Pájaro Azul', an artisanal cane spirit macerated with herbs and other ingredients that give it its characteristic bluish tone, made in the area and drunk with enthusiasm during the coplas and the visits from house to house. The Carnival of Guaranda is today Cultural Heritage of Ecuador and one of the most endearing expressions of highland folklore.
The town of Salinas de Guaranda, at some 3,550 meters of altitude, is known all over the world for its successful model of solidarity economy. From the 1970s on, with the decisive push of the Italian Salesian missionary father Antonio Polo and of community organization, its inhabitants —previously very poor and subjected for generations to the bosses who controlled the salt mines that give the town its name— created a dense network of microenterprises and cooperatives.
Under the 'El Salinerito' brand they today produce cheeses of national renown, chocolates, sausages, jams, dried mushrooms, woolen textiles and crafts that are sold throughout the country, turning an impoverished town into an international example of community development, fair trade and rural tourism. Salinas is visited by delegations from all over Latin America seeking to replicate its cooperative model.
The territory of Bolívar stretches from the high páramos that surround the Chimborazo volcano, on its western flank, to the humid foothills that descend toward the Coast, which gives it a remarkable variety of climates and landscapes in very little space: in a few hours you go from the frozen puna to warm subtropical valleys.
That diversity made it historically a land of transit between the Sierra and the coastal lowlands, and today it sustains a very varied agriculture —maize, potatoes, wheat, barley, beans and fruit in the highlands; sugarcane, cocoa, coffee and tropical fruit in the lower zones of Caluma, Echeandía and Las Naves— that is the basis of its rural economy. San José de Chimbo, for its part, is famous for its craft tradition of fireworks, guitars and gunsmithing.
Bolívar was created as a province on April 23, 1884 and its institutional life began on May 15 of that year, in the period of the consolidation of the Ecuadorian State, taking its name from the Liberator Simón Bolívar; its first cantons were Guaranda and San José de Chimbo. It is made up today of seven cantons —Guaranda, Chimbo, San Miguel, Chillanes, Echeandía, Caluma and Las Naves— and a little more than 200,000 inhabitants.
Guaranda has always been its administrative and cultural center, a small and quiet city that keeps its colonial atmosphere and its cathedral. One of the least populated in the Sierra, the province combines its traditional farming life, its famous carnival and the pioneering example of Salinas to project itself as a destination for rural, community and nature tourism in the heart of the central Andes.
Carchi, in the far north of the Sierra, was the territory of the Pasto people and of the Quillacingas, high-altitude farmers related to the communities of what is today southern Colombia, with whom they shared language, culture and an intense network for the exchange of products between ecological tiers. Their ceramics and their shaft tombs with burial chambers bear witness to a complex and commercially active society.
The region was one of the last to be incorporated into the Inca Empire before the arrival of the Spanish, under Huayna Cápac, and was forever marked by its condition as a northern frontier: first of Tawantinsuyu, then of the Royal Audiencia of Quito and finally of the Republic, on the boundary with what is now Colombia. That frontier vocation would define once and for all the trading, hard-fighting character of its inhabitants.
The capital, Tulcán, is the northernmost Ecuadorian city and one of the highest in the country, at more than 2,900 meters. Its cemetery is a work unique in the Americas: since 1936, the gardener Manuel María Azael Franco and later his family sculpted geometric figures, animals and pre-Columbian motifs into the cypresses, creating an extraordinary topiary art declared Cultural Heritage of Ecuador in 1984, 'a cemetery so beautiful it invites you to die'.
Very close by, the natural bridge of Rumichaca —'stone bridge' in Kichwa, already described by the chronicler Pedro Cieza de León in 1543— over the Carchi River is the historic land crossing between Ecuador and Colombia, a nerve center of trade, migration and binational relations through which a good part of the exchange with the neighboring department of Nariño and its city of Ipiales passes.
Carchi's great natural treasure is the El Ángel Ecological Reserve, created in 1992 over some 16,000 hectares of high-altitude páramo covered by forests of frailejones —hairy plants with velvety leaves and an almost extraterrestrial look, which can grow to more than five meters— that form one of the most singular and overwhelming landscapes of the Ecuadorian Andes.
These páramos are also great water sponges that feed rivers and communities, and their conservation is vital for the whole region. To them are added sanctuaries such as the Gruta de la Paz, a natural cave with an image of the Virgin carved by the sculptor Daniel Reyes, an important pilgrimage center in the north of the country. The province is also a fertile farming and cattle-raising area, famous for its potato production —of which it supplies a very substantial share of the national market— and for its dairy industry.
During the nineteenth century Carchi was the scene of border clashes with neighboring Colombia (then the Granadine Confederation): on 31 July 1862 the battle of Tulcán was fought nearby, one of the episodes of the boundary tensions of the García Moreno era. As a territory of its own, the province was created on 19 November 1880 —splitting off from Imbabura, initially under the name 'Veintemilla'— and renamed Carchi in 1884, after the river that runs through it.
Its condition as a border province has defined its economy: through Rumichaca and its crossings flows an intense binational trade, with times of boom and of smuggling according to the swings of currencies and prices in Ecuador and Colombia, which has made the people of Carchi a nation of traders and travelers with a strong border identity. San Gabriel, seat of the canton of Montúfar, is known for its well-preserved stone architecture.
On the southern edge of the province, shared with Imbabura, opens the warm Chota Valley, peopled by Afro-Ecuadorian communities descended from the enslaved Africans whom the Jesuits brought during the colony to work their sugarcane estates, an improbable Black enclave lodged among the mountains of the Sierra.
The valley is famous today for its 'bomba del Chota' music, its traditions and its cooking, and above all for having given Ecuador an extraordinary number of elite footballers, many of them national team players, in one of the most remarkable sporting nurseries in the country. Between its Afro culture, its páramo of frailejones and its bustling border, Carchi —with six cantons and close to 180,000 inhabitants— combines nature, commerce and identity at the northern edge of Andean Ecuador.
The province of Cañar is the heartland of the ancient Cañari people, one of the most important and warlike cultures of the Ecuadorian Andes, which fiercely resisted Inca expansion for decades. After their incorporation into the Tahuantinsuyo by Túpac Yupanqui and Huayna Cápac, the Cañari kept a tense relationship with Cuzco.
During the civil war between Huáscar and Atahualpa they sided with Huáscar, which brought them terrible reprisals from Atahualpa; later, many Cañari allied with the Spanish against the Incas. Their legacy survives in the strong Kichwa-Cañari indigenous presence in the province, visible in its dress, its language and its traditions.
The greatest treasure of the province is the Ingapirca Archaeological Complex, the most important and best preserved Inca site in Ecuador, at some 3,160 meters of altitude over the old Hatun Cañar. Its name means 'wall of the Inca' in Kichwa.
There, on an old Cañari settlement, the Incas raised the Temple of the Sun, or Castle, an imposing elliptical structure of very fine green stone masonry, oriented from east to west, which served at once as temple, astronomical observatory, fortress and administrative center, a testimony to imperial splendor in the north of the Tahuantinsuyo and to the fusion of the Cañari and the Inca.
The capital, Azogues, owes its name to the mercury (azogue) mines worked in colonial times and is today one of the great centers of toquilla straw hat weaving, the craft that the province shares with neighboring Azuay and that gives work to many communities.
Cañar keeps an intense Andean farming life and one of the most marked indigenous identities in the country. Like Azuay, it carries a strong tradition of migration to the United States, whose remittances have transformed whole towns and left a deep imprint on its social and economic life.
The Kichwa-Cañari people keep the Andean ritual calendar alive, with celebrations tied to the farming cycles: the Pawkar Raymi of flowering, the Inti Raymi of the sun and the harvest, the Killa Raymi of sowing and the Kápak Raymi of the solstice.
The Inti Raymi, in June, is celebrated with particular intensity in the city of Cañar, in Guantug park and at the Ingapirca complex itself, with dances, music, offerings to the Pachamama and traditional dress, in one of the most authentic expressions of Andean spirituality that survives in Ecuador.
Since the end of the 20th century, Cañar has been one of the provinces with the highest emigration in Ecuador, above all to the United States, in waves driven by economic crisis. Many communities have seen a good part of their men and women depart, leaving behind transnational families sustained by remittances.
That phenomenon has profoundly transformed the social landscape, with new houses in half-empty villages and a culture torn between preserving its Cañari traditions and the changes that migration brings. Today the province projects its archaeological heritage and its indigenous identity as one of its great tourist and cultural assets.
The province takes its name from Chimborazo, at 6,263 meters the highest mountain in Ecuador and, because of the bulge of the Earth at the equatorial line, the point on the planet's surface farthest from its center and therefore the 'closest to the Sun'. Its páramos hold one of the oldest human traces in the country: the 'Punín Man', a skull found in 1923 near Riobamba and attributed an age of several thousand years.
The region was the heart of the Puruhá people, farmers and herders of the central Andes whose capital, Liribamba, stood on the plain of what is now Colta. The Puruhaes were incorporated into the Inca Empire towards the end of the fifteenth century, and the legend of the Duchicela dynasty weaves the link between the Puruhá lords and the house of Cuzco. Today their high-altitude páramos are a refuge for the vicuña, successfully reintroduced in the Chimborazo Wildlife Production Reserve, where llamas, alpacas and condors can also be seen in a puna landscape that evokes the altiplano.
Old Riobamba was founded beside the Colta lagoon, on top of the old Liribamba, in the earliest days of the conquest, and was one of the first Spanish cities settled in what is now Ecuador; very close by, the church of Balbanera is venerated as the first Catholic temple raised in the country. The devastating earthquake of 4 February 1797 razed the city completely and forced its removal to the plain of Tapi, its present site, turning it into a planned town of broad streets and squares.
There, between August and September 1830, the first Constituent Assembly of Ecuador met and drafted the first Constitution of the Republic, which named General Juan José Flores president. That founding act earned Riobamba the title of 'cradle of Ecuadorian nationhood'; stately and republican in its architecture, it is also known as the 'Sultana of the Andes' and the 'City of Firsts'.
From Chimborazo departs one of the most celebrated engineering feats in the Americas: the stretch of the trans-Andean railway known as the Devil's Nose, near Alausí, where the tracks climb an almost vertical wall of the mountain by means of a dizzying system of zigzags that gains height in a minimum of space. The work, driven by Eloy Alfaro and completed in the early twentieth century, cost countless laborers' lives —many of them Jamaican workmen brought in for the job— and became a symbol of the physical union between the Coast and the Sierra.
For decades the branch line was one of the great railway attractions of the continent, its carriages descending between precipices above the canyon of the Chanchán River. Alausí, a charming railway town crowned by the statue of Saint Peter, remains the gateway to this legendary run in the south of the province.
Chimborazo is a mountaineering destination par excellence and a landmark in the history of science. In 1802 the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, accompanied by Aimé Bonpland and the Quito-born Carlos Montúfar, reached on its slopes a record altitude for the time and described for the first time the vegetation belts of an equatorial volcano, in a plate famous throughout Europe. For a long time the snow-capped summit was considered by many to be the highest mountain in the world.
In 1880 the British alpinist Edward Whymper, together with the Italian guides Jean-Antoine and Louis Carrel, made the first documented ascent to the top. Today its refuges and the walks through the wildlife reserve make Chimborazo a magnet for Andean climbing, in a landscape of perpetual snows, sand flats and páramo.
Chimborazo retains one of the largest Indigenous populations in Ecuador —close to four out of every ten inhabitants identify as Indigenous— and an intense Andean farming life. Its colorful markets, such as the crowded Thursday tianguez of Guamote, and the communities of its ten cantons keep alive the Kichwa language, the dress and the festivals of the agricultural calendar. Guano, north of Riobamba, is famous for its leather crafts, rugs and woolen weavings.
The province also shares with its neighbors the vast Sangay National Park, a UNESCO Natural World Heritage Site, which links the Andean páramos and glaciers with the Amazon rainforest and protects, among other treasures, the Ozogoche lake system. Between mountain tourism, high-altitude agriculture and a vibrant Indigenous culture, Chimborazo stands out as one of the Andean hearts of the country.
The province of Cotopaxi, in the central Sierra, was the territory of the Panzaleo people before the arrival of the Incas, who brought it into their network of roads, tambos and pucarás. Its geography is dominated by the great snow-capped cones of the so-called 'Avenue of the Volcanoes', one of the most spectacular mountain corridors on the planet.
It was the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt who, travelling through the country at the beginning of the nineteenth century, gave that inter-Andean corridor its name, struck by the succession of volcanoes —Cotopaxi, Rumiñahui, Iliniza, Quilindaña— lined up on either side of the valley. The fertility of its volcanic soils made the region a key farming and cattle-raising area, and today also one of Ecuador's great centers of export flower growing.
Latacunga, the capital, was established as a Spanish settlement around 1534 under the name 'Asiento de San Vicente Mártir de Latacunga' and formally organized in the following decades; the Jesuits founded their first school there around 1643. The city suffered repeated destruction from earthquakes and from the eruptions of nearby Cotopaxi, an almost perfect cone of some 5,897 meters that is one of the highest active volcanoes in the world and, for many, the most beautiful in the Andes.
The great eruption of 1877 sent down lahars —avalanches of mud and melted ice— that swept along the valleys at enormous speed, wiping out settlements and reaching far from the mountain. Cotopaxi National Park, one of the most visited in the country, today protects its páramo, its glaciers and its wildlife of deer, Andean foxes and condors, with the Limpiopungo lagoon at the foot of the volcano.
In the western range, the Quilotoa lagoon fills the crater of a volcano and displays an intense turquoise color at almost 3,900 meters of altitude; it is one of the most photographed landscapes in Ecuador and the axis of the celebrated 'Quilotoa Loop', a multi-day walking circuit among Kichwa communities, páramos, canyons and Indigenous villages.
Near Latacunga, the town of Saquisilí is famous for its crowded Thursday Indigenous market, one of the most authentic in the Andes, spread over several squares of produce, animals and crafts. Pujilí, for its part, is renowned for its showy Corpus Christi and its feathered dancers, declared cultural heritage, and Salcedo for its traditional fruit ice creams, known by the town's name all over the country.
Cotopaxi retains a strong Kichwa-Panzaleo Indigenous presence, above all in the Quilotoa area and in cantons such as Pujilí, Sigchos and Zumbahua, where the communities keep their language, their dress, their markets and their art. From the village of Tigua came a celebrated school of naïf painting that portrays Andean life, the volcanoes and the festivals in vivid colors on sheepskin, sought today by collectors all over the world.
The Mama Negra festival of Latacunga —the Santísima Tragedia— is the great celebration of the province: an explosion of color that fuses Indigenous, African and Spanish traditions in honor of the Virgin of Mercy. Through its streets parade figures such as the Ángel de la Estrella, the Rey Moro, the Abanderado, the huacos and the Mama Negra herself on horseback, in one of the most spectacular expressions of Ecuadorian cultural mestizaje.
The shadow of Cotopaxi hangs over the province: in the event of a great eruption like that of 1877, its glaciers could again generate lahars capable of razing Latacunga and the nearby valleys, which is why the area has hazard maps, early warning systems and evacuation plans that are permanently under review, especially after the volcano's reactivation in 2015 and 2022.
Between that latent threat and its incomparable beauty, Cotopaxi —created as a province in 1851 and once called the 'province of León'— lives today off high-altitude agriculture, cattle raising, a powerful export trade in roses and summer flowers, and a nature and adventure tourism that has made it one of the most visited provinces of the Sierra.
The province's name comes from the gold wealth of the Zaruma and Portovelo region, worked since pre-Hispanic times by the local peoples —heirs of the cultures of the southern coast and of the area of influence of Tumbes— and then intensively during the colony, when the Spanish crown organized a mining industry there that filled the royal coffers with gold. The area was sighted by the conquistadors around 1537, when they came upon the 'settlement of the Machalas'.
Zaruma, founded in the last decades of the sixteenth century, became one of the most important mining enclaves of the Royal Audiencia of Quito. Under the republic, the mining boom was renewed when foreign companies, such as the South American Development Company in Portovelo, industrialized extraction at the beginning of the twentieth century, drawing thousands of workers to the shafts of the El Oro highlands.
Machala, the provincial capital, is known as the 'Banana Capital of the World' for being the center of the largest banana-producing and banana-exporting area on the planet. The 'banana boom', which took off around 1948, completely transformed the province's economy and landscape: since then Ecuador has been the world's leading exporter of the fruit, and El Oro its heart, with Puerto Bolívar as the main shipping terminal.
The provincial economy turns largely on bananas, complemented by shrimp farmed in the ponds of its coastal areas —the country is also one of the world's largest exporters of prawns—, fishing, cacao, highland coffee and trade with neighboring Peru. With close to 750,000 inhabitants spread over fourteen cantons, it is one of the most thriving and populous agro-exporting regions in the country.
Because it is a province bordering Peru, El Oro was the main Ecuadorian setting of the war of 1941. After the fighting around Zarumilla, Peruvian troops occupied Puerto Bolívar, Machala, Santa Rosa and much of the territory of El Oro, and aircraft bombed Santa Rosa, forcing many inhabitants to flee towards Guayaquil, Cuenca and Quito. The conflict was settled by the Rio de Janeiro Protocol of 1942, which imposed on Ecuador the loss of vast Amazonian territories.
The dispute with Peru remained open for decades, until the Brasilia Peace Accords of 1998 definitively closed it. Since then the border has gone from a theater of war to a space of integration and binational trade, with intense exchange through Huaquillas and the Peruvian region of Tumbes, which today makes the province a lively commercial gateway in the south.
Zaruma is a jewel of the El Oro highlands: a mining town of steep streets and polychrome wooden houses in republican style, perched on the mountain at more than a thousand meters of altitude, with its church, its balconies and its square frozen in time. Its gold mining, begun in pre-Hispanic times and organized by the crown during the colony, kept it for centuries as one of the country's great mining centers.
Its urban ensemble of vernacular wooden architecture led it to appear on UNESCO's tentative list as a candidate for World Heritage status and to be declared Cultural Heritage of Ecuador. In recent years, however, the subsidence of the ground caused by clandestine mining —with sinkholes that have swallowed buildings and a school— has put part of the historic center at serious risk, in a dramatic tug-of-war between gold and heritage.
Beyond its banana plantations, El Oro preserves important mangrove ecosystems along its shore, such as those of the Jambelí archipelago, a refuge for birds and molluscs and a natural nursery for fish and crustaceans, today in tension with the spread of the shrimp farms that have cleared much of the original mangrove. Inland, shared with Loja, the Puyango Petrified Forest holds one of the largest collections of fossilized trunks and leaves in the Americas, with trees turned to stone more than a hundred million years ago.
Between the mining mountains of Zaruma and Portovelo, the banana plains of the coast and the mangroves of Jambelí, the province combines a strong agro-exporting vocation with a natural and architectural heritage that is beginning to win a place on the tourist map of southern Ecuador, though it also faces the challenges of mining pollution and pressure on its coasts.
Esmeraldas, in the far northwest, is the «green province», covered by the humid forest of the Chocó, one of the rainiest and most biodiverse regions on the planet, which stretches south into Colombia. Before the Spanish arrived, its coasts were inhabited by peoples such as the La Tolita Indians, who left behind remarkable gold and platinum metalwork.
That pre-Hispanic legacy, together with the exuberance of its forests and rivers, made Esmeraldas a rich and isolated land, barely touched for centuries by colonial power, which scarcely managed to establish itself in the region.
The most singular feature of Esmeraldas is its Afro-Ecuadorian origin. In October 1553 a slave ship sailing from Panama to Peru was wrecked off its coasts, and the Africans who managed to free themselves headed into the forest. Together with Indigenous people they formed free maroon communities that the Spanish called the «Kingdom of the Zambos».
Its most famous leader was Alonso de Illescas, an African who consolidated that autonomous territory —perhaps the first space of freedom founded on the continent by survivors of the slave trade— until he won recognition from the Crown. In 1997 the Ecuadorian Congress declared Illescas a National Hero, defender of the freedom of the Afro-descendant and Indigenous peoples.
From that African root came an extraordinarily rich culture: marimba music, the arrullos and chigualos, the décimas and a unique cuisine based on coconut, plantain, fish and seafood, such as the celebrated encocado.
The marimba music and traditional songs of Esmeraldas and of the southern Colombian Pacific were declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by Unesco in 2015. Esmeraldas is today the great Afro-descendant heart of Ecuador, with a vibrant and proud cultural identity.
The city of Esmeraldas is an important port and the site of the country's main state-owned refinery, the end point of the trans-Ecuadorian pipeline that brings crude oil from the Amazon across the Andes.
The province is also a very popular beach destination, above all for highlanders: Atacames, with its lively nightlife; Súa, Same and Tonsupa; and, further south, quiet Mompiche, with its surf break and its mangroves. Its Chocó and mangrove reserves, such as Mataje-Cayapas, protect some of the richest ecosystems in the country.
In the far north of the province, the Manglares Cayapas-Mataje Ecological Reserve protects the tallest mangroves in the world, with trees over sixty meters high, and a coastal ecosystem of enormous richness shared with the Afro-descendant population and with Chachi and Épera Indigenous communities.
Esmeraldas faces great challenges today: the deforestation of the Chocó, oil pollution around the port, structural poverty and, in recent years, the heavy impact of drug-trafficking violence on the northern border. Even so, its vibrant Afro-Ecuadorian culture, its lush nature and its beaches keep it one of the most singular and liveliest provinces in Ecuador.
The Galápagos Islands, some 1,000 km from the mainland, are volcanic in origin and rose from a «hot spot» on the floor of the Pacific; their westernmost islands, such as Isabela and Fernandina, are still volcanically active. They were sighted by chance in 1535 by Fray Tomás de Berlanga, bishop of Panama, whose ship was pushed off course by the currents.
For centuries they were a refuge for pirates and whalers, who called them the «Enchanted Islands» for their mists and their deceptive currents, which seemed to move the islands from place to place, and who named the giant tortoises «galápagos», the name that stuck to the archipelago.
Ecuador formally took possession of the archipelago in 1832. Barely three years later, in 1835, the young naturalist Charles Darwin arrived aboard HMS Beagle and spent some five weeks studying its wildlife. He observed how the tortoises of different islands had different shells and how the finches varied the shape of their beaks according to the food available on each island.
Those observations were one of the seeds of his theory of evolution by natural selection, published in 1859 in «On the Origin of Species». Galápagos has been synonymous ever since with evolutionary biology and is one of the most important places in the history of science.
In 1959, on the centenary of Darwin's work, Ecuador declared 97% of the archipelago the Galápagos National Park, the country's first, and the Charles Darwin Foundation was created, which in 1964 opened its research station in Puerto Ayora, devoted to research and to the captive breeding of giant tortoises.
In 1978 Galápagos became the first site in the world inscribed by Unesco as a Natural World Heritage Site, and later a Biosphere Reserve and a Marine Reserve, one of the largest on the planet.
The endemic wildlife of Galápagos —giant tortoises, marine iguanas (the only lizards that feed in the sea), land iguanas, blue-footed boobies, flightless cormorants, equatorial penguins, fur seals and sea lions— has made it one of the most sought-after nature destinations in the world, a place where the animals show no fear of human beings.
The inhabited islands —Santa Cruz, with Puerto Ayora; San Cristóbal, with the provincial capital Puerto Baquerizo Moreno; Isabela, the largest; and Floreana— live on regulated tourism and on science, and from them travelers visit emblematic sites such as Bartolomé, Española, Genovesa or the León Dormido islet.
The great challenge of Galápagos is the balance between conserving the ecosystem and the pressure of tourism, population growth and invasive species —goats, rats, introduced plants and animals— that threaten the native fauna. Eradication and breeding programs, such as the one that tried in vain to save «Lonesome George», the last tortoise of his subspecies, who died in 2012, illustrate that struggle.
Every visitor must follow strict rules and tour the islands with authorized guides in order to protect an irreplaceable natural heritage, this «living laboratory of evolution» that goes on astonishing the world almost two centuries after Darwin.
The Guayas region, around the great river of the same name and the mouth of the largest river basin of the South American Pacific, was inhabited by peoples such as the huancavilcas and the chonos, seafarers and traders of the coast and heirs to the old manteña tradition. The legend of the chief Guayas and his wife Quil gave the city its name, according to popular tradition.
After several attempts frustrated by tenacious Indigenous resistance, Santiago de Guayaquil was definitively founded in 1547, on the banks of the Guayas river, as the great Pacific port of the Royal Audiencia of Quito and its window onto trade with the rest of the empire.
During the colonial period Guayaquil was the great shipyard of the South Pacific, where the Crown's ships were built and repaired, and the port through which cacao left and the goods of the world came in. Its commercial, open, mercantile character gave it an identity very different from that of the Sierra: more liberal, cosmopolitan and tied to the sea. It also suffered repeated pirate attacks and devastating fires that forced it to rebuild time and again.
From that coastal root came a distinctive montuvia and port culture, with its music, its speech and its cuisine of seafood, plantain and rice, which contrasted with the Andean world of Quito and fed the historic regionalism of Ecuador.
Guayaquil had an emancipation epic of its own. On October 9, 1820, a group of civilian and military patriots proclaimed the city free and organized the Free Province of Guayaquil, which raised an army to liberate the Sierra and contributed decisively to the victory at Pichincha in 1822.
In July 1822 the city was the setting for the historic Guayaquil Conference between Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín, the two great liberators of South America, who discussed the future of the continent behind closed doors. Shortly afterwards Bolívar incorporated Guayaquil into Gran Colombia, frustrating the dream of full independence held by the people of Guayaquil.
Guayaquil was the cradle of Ecuadorian liberalism. Here, on June 5, 1895, the Liberal Revolution broke out that brought to power Eloy Alfaro, the «Old Fighter» from Manabí, and that imposed secularism, public education, the civil registry and divorce, transforming the state from its foundations.
The great work of alfarismo, completed in 1908, was the trans-Andean railway that linked the port with Quito by way of the Devil's Nose, connecting the Coast and the Sierra for the first time. The city was also the scene of social tensions such as the massacre of workers on November 15, 1922, one of the founding episodes of the Ecuadorian labor movement.
Today Guayaquil is the most populous city in Ecuador and its main commercial, financial and port engine, with the country's largest seaport. Its urban renewal of recent decades —with the Malecón 2000, the historic neighborhood of Las Peñas and the Santa Ana hill crowned by a lighthouse— has renewed its image and its tourist life.
The province of Guayas, agro-industrial and banana-growing, is also the gateway to the Galápagos and to the Ruta del Spondylus. In 2020 the city was one of the places in the world hardest hit by the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic, and in recent years it has suffered with particular severity the crisis of drug-trafficking violence that affects the whole Coast.
Imbabura, the «Province of the Lakes», was settled thousands of years ago by the caranquis and, later, by the otavalos and natabuelas, peoples of farmers and skilled highland traders. Organized in a confederation, they put up one of the fiercest and longest resistances to the expansion of the Inca Empire, which fought for years to subdue the region under the command of Huayna Cápac.
The conquest culminated, around the beginning of the sixteenth century, in a great battle and massacre beside a lake that has been called Yahuarcocha ever since —the «lake of blood» in Kichwa—, in memory of the thousands of fallen warriors whose bodies, according to tradition, stained its waters. Even under Inca and later Spanish rule, the otavalos tenaciously preserved their Kichwa language, their dress and their extraordinary textile tradition, handed down from generation to generation.
The town of Otavalo is famous the world over for its Indigenous market on the Plaza de Ponchos, one of the largest, oldest and most colorful in the Americas, and for its weavers, who take ponchos, tapestries, shawls, hats and crafts to fairs on every continent. During the colonial period the obrajes of the area —textile workshops where the Crown exploited Indigenous labor under the mita system— produced cloth that was sold throughout the viceroyalty, in brutal conditions for the workers.
Out of that painful legacy, however, the otavalos managed to build an industry of their own and a trading network that made them one of the most prosperous and well-traveled Indigenous peoples in Latin America. Today they are a symbol of pride in Kichwa identity in Ecuador: their looms, their Andean music —carried around the world— and their global presence make Otavalo a singular case of modern Indigenous success rooted in tradition.
The capital, San Miguel de Ibarra, was founded in 1606 by order of the Audiencia and is known as the «White City» for its whitewashed houses and its colonial facades. On August 16, 1868, a violent earthquake razed it almost completely and left thousands dead; President Gabriel García Moreno led its reconstruction, and the survivors, who had camped for years on the nearby plains, «returned» to the reborn city on April 28, 1872, a date still celebrated today.
Near Ibarra, the Yahuarcocha lake —now turned into a popular motor-racing circuit and lakeside resort— and the historic Ibarra–Salinas railway, revived as the tourist «Freedom Train», recall both the pre-Hispanic past and the republic's drive to modernize. The city keeps a stately, quiet atmosphere, and is famous as well for its «helados de paila», churned by hand over ice.
The province is dotted with lakes of volcanic origin —Cuicocha, in the crater of the Cotacachi volcano, with its two islets; San Pablo, at the foot of the imposing Imbabura; Yahuarcocha; and Mojanda—, surrounded by páramos, forests and lookout points. The Imbabura and Cotacachi volcanoes and the snow-capped Cayambe frame a landscape that combines water, mountain and farmland in a mosaic of rare beauty.
Around them flourish towns specializing in crafts: Cotacachi, the country's leather capital, with its long street of leather workshops; San Antonio de Ibarra, famous throughout the Americas for its wood carvers and sculptors; Atuntaqui (Antonio Ante), a textile and food center; and the communities of the warm Chota valley, of Afro-Ecuadorian roots, famous for their «bomba» music and for having given great footballers to the national team.
On May 30, 2019, Imbabura was recognized by Unesco as a Global Geopark, in view of its exceptional geological heritage of volcanoes, lakes and ravines and of its living cultural richness, becoming the first territory in Ecuador with that distinction. The geopark links the conservation of the landscape with community tourism and the appreciation of the Kichwa and Afro cultures that inhabit it.
Today the province —with six cantons and close to half a million inhabitants— lives on tourism, crafts, farming and livestock. Its combination of lake landscapes, vibrant Kichwa culture, world-famous textile tradition and closeness to Quito keeps it one of the most visited destinations in the northern sierra of Ecuador.
The province of Loja, in the far south of the Sierra, was the territory of the Palta people —a confederation of tribes with similar language and organization— before the arrival of the Incas, who subdued the region under Túpac Yupanqui after nearly half a century of resistance and brought it into their royal road running north. The city of Loja was founded by captain Alonso de Mercadillo around 1546-1548 in the Cuxibamba valley, at first under the name 'La Zarza'.
Its position made it a strategic enclave on the southern frontier and an obligatory corridor for trade between the Viceroyalty of Peru and New Granada, as well as a gateway to the Amazon by way of Zamora. Its relative isolation among the mountains, far from the great centers of power, forged for it a strong cultural identity, mestizo and remarkably well preserved down the centuries.
From the forests of Loja comes the cascarilla or quina, the bark of the cinchona tree from which quinine is extracted, the world's first effective remedy against malaria. Through the colonial centuries, Loja's cinchona bark —celebrated as the 'counts' bark' after curing, according to tradition, the Countess of Chinchón— was exported to Europe and to the tropical colonies as a product of enormous strategic value.
Its importance was such that the cinchona tree appears on the national coat of arms of Ecuador, as a symbol of the country's natural wealth. Intensive exploitation, however, stripped bare the wild stands of the region, and the smuggling of seeds to the British and Dutch colonies in Asia ended up moving the business far from the Andes, closing a chapter that had put Loja on the world scientific map.
Loja is known as the 'musical and cultural capital of Ecuador'. Out of it came famous composers of the pasillo and of Ecuadorian national music, and it preserves an old tradition of conservatories, orchestras and bands; its Conservatory and its International Festival of Living Arts keep it as one of the country's great cultural landmarks. The National University of Loja, one of the oldest in Ecuador, has reinforced since the 19th century its role as the intellectual beacon of the south.
The city also boasts a pioneering milestone: in 1897 one of the first hydroelectric plants in Ecuador was inaugurated in Loja, thanks to which the city had electric lighting among the first in the country. To that innovative streak is added today the modern Villonaco wind farm, installed on a wind-swept hill, one of the first of its kind in Ecuador and a symbol of renewable energy.
South of the city, the Vilcabamba valley became world famous as the 'Valley of Longevity', for the reputation of its inhabitants for living many years in good health, put down to its mild, steady climate, its water and its placid life. Science has qualified the myth of the 'supercentenarians' —many ages turned out to be exaggerated for lack of records—, but the aura of the place remains intact.
Today Vilcabamba is a destination for hiking, wellness and healthy living, with a sizeable international community of foreign residents who have made the town a small cosmopolitan enclave among the mountains. Nearby, the Saraguros —Kichwa Indigenous people with a distinctive black dress— preserve in their canton one of the most marked Andean identities of the south, and Catamayo, in the warm valley, is the province's air gateway.
The province holds, shared with Zamora Chinchipe, Podocarpus National Park, a refuge of extraordinary biodiversity in the transition between the Andes and the Amazon, with one of the greatest concentrations of birds and of orchids in the world and forests of the romerillo pine that gives it its name. Its territory forms part of the Podocarpus-El Cóndor Biosphere Reserve, recognized by Unesco.
That natural heritage, added to its culture, its frontier history and its well-preserved historic center, makes Loja —a province of sixteen cantons and close to half a million inhabitants— an emerging destination for ecotourism and birdwatching, in one of the most singular and least crowded corners of Ecuador. Shared with El Oro, the Puyango Petrified Forest rounds out its scientific wealth with fossilized trunks millions of years old.
Los Ríos, in the interior of the Coast region, owes its name to the dense network of rivers that run across it —tributaries of the great Guayas system, such as the Babahoyo, the Vinces, the Quevedo and the Zapotal— and which historically were its routes of communication and trade, traveled by rafts and by the river steamers that carried produce toward the port of Guayaquil. Before it was a land of haciendas, it was home to coastal peoples linked to the old Manteño-Huancavilca tradition.
It is, above all else, the land of the montubio: the mestizo peasant of the coast, a horseman through and through, with his culture of amorfinos, rodeos, décimas and contrapuntos, officially recognized as part of the country's heritage. Its alluvial soils and its warm, humid climate made it one of the most fertile and productive farming areas of Ecuador.
The province was one of the epicenters of the great cacao boom that enriched Ecuador between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, when the 'golden bean' was the country's main export and its enormous cacao estates dominated the national economy. The great landowners —the 'gran cacao'— amassed colossal fortunes that they spent in Paris, and their Frenchified way of life left a surprising architectural mark.
The best example is Vinces, nicknamed 'little Paris' for its European-style buildings, its iron balconies and its replica of the Eiffel Tower, a testimony to that splendor. The fall in prices and the cacao blights of the 1920s put an end to the boom and plunged the region into a deep social crisis, portrayed in the literature of Ecuadorian realism, before new crops took over.
After the cacao crisis, in the middle of the 20th century came the banana, of which Ecuador became the world's leading exporter, and Los Ríos turned into one of its great producers, with immense plantations stretching to the horizon. To these was added rice, of which the province is the country's main larder, along with maize, soy and other crops that make it an engine of the Coast's agro-export economy.
Cities such as Quevedo, an important trading hub of great population diversity —with a notable community of Chinese origin that left its mark on commerce and cooking—, and the capital, Babahoyo, grew on the back of this farming economy. Today Los Ríos, with thirteen cantons and close to a million inhabitants, is one of the most populous provinces in the country.
Babahoyo, the provincial capital, stands on the banks of the river of the same name, in lowland country that floods every winter when the rivers rise, to the point that a good part of the city and its surroundings has historically lived with the water and with houses on stilts, in the so-called 'floating towns'. It was once called 'Bodegas', for its role as a great warehouse and customs post where the goods moving up and down the Guayas basin were gathered.
The province of Los Ríos was officially created on October 6, 1860, with Babahoyo as its capital. The city, razed by a fire in 1867 and rebuilt on the riverbank, has always been a river port and a collection center for the farm produce that goes down toward Guayaquil, the logistical heart of the great Guayas basin.
Los Ríos is the cradle of a rich montubio culture, with the montubio rodeo, the amorfinos, the galope, the music and the traditions of the coastal countryside, officially recognized as part of the country's cultural heritage. The region and its people inspired the writers of Ecuadorian social realism of the Generation of the 1930s —José de la Cuadra, Demetrio Aguilera Malta, Enrique Gil Gilbert and the 'Grupo de Guayaquil'—, who portrayed the hard life of the coastal peasant in works such as 'Los que se van' and 'Los Sangurimas'.
Today Los Ríos remains one of the great farming larders of Ecuador and an engine of the Coast's agro-export economy, among plantations of banana, rice, cacao and maize. Between its rivers, its haciendas, its literature and its living montubio culture, the province keeps an identity deeply tied to the land and to the water.
Manabí is one of the cradles of American civilization. On its coasts and those of neighboring Santa Elena, from around 3800 BC, the Valdivia culture flourished, one of the oldest on the continent, famous for the earliest pottery in the Americas and for its female figurines, the 'Venus figures of Valdivia'.
It was followed by the Machalilla and Chorrera cultures, and later by the Bahía and the Jama-Coaque, down to the great Manteño-Huancavilca confederation, skilled navigators who on great sailing rafts dominated the spondylus trade all across the Pacific, from Mexico to Chile, and whose stone 'U-shaped seats' are enigmatic testimony to their power.
During the colonial period, the coast of Manabí was a land of ports, fishing, coastal shipping and farming. Out of the mixture of Indigenous people, Spaniards and people of African descent was born the montubio, the mestizo peasant of the coast, a horseman through and through, with a culture of his own of amorfinos, rodeos, décimas and traditions that today is officially recognized as part of the country's heritage.
Portoviejo, the provincial capital founded in 1535 by Francisco Pacheco, is one of the oldest cities in Ecuador. The province was also, in the 19th century, the birthplace of Eloy Alfaro, the leader of the Liberal Revolution, born in Montecristi, a town famous for its very fine toquilla straw hats.
Manta, the great fishing port of the province, is the tuna capital of Ecuador and home to a powerful canning industry that exports around the world. To the south, Puerto López is the gateway to Machalilla National Park, the only protected area in the country that brings together coast, tropical dry forest, cloud forest and islands, among them Isla de la Plata, nicknamed 'the poor man's Galápagos' for its colonies of boobies and frigatebirds.
Every year, between June and September, humpback whales come to these warm waters to mate and calve, turning Puerto López into the national capital of whale watching. Los Frailes beach, inside the park, is considered one of the most beautiful in the country.
On April 16, 2016, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Manabí hard, causing more than 600 deaths and enormous damage in Pedernales, Portoviejo, Manta, Canoa and Bahía de Caráquez. It was one of the greatest recent catastrophes in Ecuador and put national solidarity to the test.
Since then, the province has been slowly rebuilding, raising its cities and its tourist infrastructure once more, in a process that still leaves visible traces in many of its coastal towns.
Today Manabí combines its strong montubio identity and a cuisine —built on peanuts, green plantain, fish and seafood— rated among the best in Ecuador, with a tourism of beaches, surf and nature drawn by the Ruta del Spondylus.
Towns such as Canoa, with its long beach and its relaxed atmosphere, Ayampe, a refuge for surfers and backpackers, Puerto Cayo and Bahía de Caráquez offer a coastline of waves, sunsets and dry forest that coexists with artisanal fishing and the quiet life of the central coast.
Morona Santiago, in the Amazonian southeast, is the heart of the territory of the Shuar people, one of the most numerous and best known Amazonian peoples of Ecuador. Known in the past for the ritual practice of the 'tsantsa' —the shrinking of the heads of their enemies— and for their fierce defense of their freedom, the Shuar prevented their subjugation for centuries by the Incas and by the Spanish alike.
Alongside their Achuar kin, the Shuar today keep a strong political organization and a rich culture bound to the jungle, its sacred waterfalls and their worldview, and they are a key player in the defense of Amazonian territories.
The valley of the Upano river, around the capital Macas, holds the remains of the ancient Upano culture, an Amazonian society that flourished more than two thousand years ago. Recent research led by the archaeologist Stéphen Rostain, published in the journal Science in January 2024 and based on LIDAR technology, revealed a vast urban network beneath the jungle.
Some 6,000 artificial platforms were identified —houses, plazas and mounds— connected by avenues and drainage canals, in at least fifteen settlements, which makes it one of the oldest known cities of the Amazon and one of the greatest archaeological finds in the region. Its existence brought down the old idea of a jungle incapable of sustaining large populations.
Macas, the provincial capital, was founded by missionaries and grew as an isolated enclave in the jungle, 'the eastern emerald', until roads connected it with the Sierra in the 20th century.
It is today the gateway to this part of the Oriente, a service center surrounded by Shuar communities, waterfalls and rivers, and the starting point toward the great Sangay massif and the deep jungle of the southern Amazon.
The province holds a good part of Sangay National Park, one of the largest protected areas in the country, declared a Natural World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1983. The park runs from the Andean páramos and glaciers down to the Amazon rainforest.
It includes the Sangay volcano, one of the most active in the world, with almost constant eruptions, and protects a sanctuary of biodiversity —tapirs, spectacled bears, condors— that connects the Sierra with the Oriente along a unique ecological gradient.
The Cordillera del Cóndor, in the southeast of the province, holds important mineral deposits that have made Morona Santiago one of the focal points of large-scale mining in Ecuador, with megaprojects such as Mirador and San Carlos-Panantza, a source of sharp conflicts with the Shuar communities over the impact on their territories and their rivers.
Between mining, cattle ranching, settlement and the defense of the jungle, the province lives through tensions that sum up the dilemmas of the whole Ecuadorian Amazon. Its combination of archaeological heritage —the astonishing city of the Upano—, living Shuar culture and the nature of the Sangay projects it, all the same, as one of the Amazonian destinations with the greatest potential in the country.
The province of Napo, on the Amazonian foothills where the Andes fray into the rainforest, is the ancestral territory of the Amazonian Kichwa people —the napo runa— and of Waorani communities. The region is historically known as «the cinnamon capital», in memory of the legendary «Land of Cinnamon» that the Spanish conquistadors hunted feverishly in the sixteenth century, lured by the trade in the ishpingo tree, the Amazonian cinnamon.
It was from these forests that, in 1541, the expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro and Francisco de Orellana set out; lost, starving and decimated, it would end in 1542 with the first complete European descent of the Amazon river, one of the greatest odysseys of the conquest. The area was folded into the Quijos Governorship, whose seat, Baeza, was founded by Gil Ramírez Dávalos in 1559 as one of the first towns of the Oriente.
In 1578, the chief Jumandy led the great Quijos rebellion against Spanish rule: the peoples of the rainforest burned Ávila and Archidona and came close to driving out the colonizers, until they were defeated and Jumandy, captured and executed in Quito, became one of the great symbols of Amazonian Indigenous resistance. After the revolt, the vast Oriente remained for centuries in the hands of the religious missions —Dominicans, Jesuits until their expulsion in 1768 and, already in the twentieth century, the Josephites of Murialdo, who settled in Tena in 1922.
The rubber boom, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drew traders and settlers and subjected Indigenous peoples to brutal conditions, an episode of exploitation that left deep scars. Napo was one of the regions hardest hit by the loss of Amazonian territory after the 1941 conflict with Peru, and over the course of the century it was progressively subdivided: created as a province in 1959, it gave up territory to form Sucumbíos in 1989 and Orellana in 1998.
Tena, the provincial capital, founded in the sixteenth century as an outpost in the jungle, is one of the Amazonian cities most easily reached from Quito and has become Ecuador's capital of rafting and kayaking, thanks to the rushing rivers —the Napo, the Misahuallí, the Jatunyacu— that come down from the cordillera and cut across the foothill rainforest. Its main square, its suspension bridges over the river and its jungle atmosphere make it an ideal base for exploring the Oriente.
Nearby towns such as Misahuallí —famous for the mischievous capuchin monkeys running loose in its square and for its river beach— and Archidona are gateways to the rainforest, to the Kichwa communities and to community tourism experiences, caves such as the Jumandy caverns, waterfalls and exuberant biodiversity. The upgrading of the Papallacta-Baeza-Tena roads has given a strong push to nature tourism over the past decade.
The province takes in part of the Cayambe-Coca Ecological Reserve and the Sumaco Napo-Galeras National Park, with its conical volcano and its Amazonian cloud forest, a mosaic of ecosystems of enormous biodiversity recognized by Unesco as the Sumaco Biosphere Reserve. Among its natural attractions stood the imposing San Rafael waterfall, the highest in Ecuador at close to 150 meters, whose drop collapsed abruptly in February 2020 for geological reasons, a reminder of the force and the fragility of this landscape.
In the canton of El Chaco stands the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric plant, the largest in Ecuador, inaugurated in 2016 on the Coca river; its proximity to the San Rafael collapse fueled the debate over the balance between energy and the conservation of the basin.
The Amazonian Kichwa people of Napo, heirs to a deep tradition of knowledge of the rainforest, have made their culture one of the province's great attractions. The communities offer community tourism, cassava chicha, dances, crafts made from seeds and chambira fiber, and the wisdom of their «yachaks» or sages; wayusa, a stimulant leaf drunk at dawn in the «guayusadas», is a central part of daily life.
Fine aroma cacao, grown in these lands since ancestral times and today worked by associations of Kichwa producers, has become one of Napo's economic flagships, with Amazonian-origin chocolates that win international awards and combine tradition, biodiversity and fair trade. With barely some 130,000 inhabitants across five cantons, Napo is betting on a development model built on the living forest and on the leading role of its peoples.
The province is named after Francisco de Orellana, the conquistador from Extremadura who in 1542, after setting out from the Ecuadorian Oriente with Gonzalo Pizarro's expedition in search of the Land of Cinnamon, accidentally completed the first full European descent of the Amazon river, which he named —according to the chronicle of Friar Gaspar de Carvajal— after a supposed encounter with warrior women who called to mind the Amazons of Greek mythology.
The region, in the basin of the Napo river, was for centuries the territory of Amazonian peoples such as the Waorani (Huaorani), renowned for their isolation and their fierceness, and the Kichwa, barely touched by the missions and by the weak colonial presence. Well into the twentieth century it was still one of the most remote and inaccessible areas of the country, a world of rainforest crossed by great rivers.
Puerto Francisco de Orellana, popularly known as Coca, at the confluence of the Napo, Coca and Payamino rivers, grew as a center of Amazonian oil extraction from the 1970s on, turning from a jungle hamlet into a booming oil town and one of the main administrative and commercial hubs of the Oriente.
In 1998, the region split from Napo to form the province of Orellana, the twenty-second in the country, made up of four cantons —Orellana, La Joya de los Sachas, Loreto and the remote Aguarico— and home to some 180,000 people. Today it is one of Ecuador's main oil districts and, at the same time, the gateway to the deepest rainforest, the starting point for river cruises and expeditions into the Yasuní.
Orellana holds the heart of Yasuní National Park, a Unesco Biosphere Reserve since 1989 and one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet: close to 600 bird species have been recorded there, more than 150 amphibians, a hundred reptiles and over 2,000 plant species, so that a single hectare may contain more tree species than all of North America.
It is also the territory of Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation, the Tagaeri and Taromenane, relatives of the Waorani who reject all contact with the outside world and whose survival depends on the protection of their forest. To shield them, an «Untouchable Zone» closed to all extractive activity was created inside the park, though clashes with settlers and loggers have cost lives on both sides.
The Yasuní embodies the great Ecuadorian dilemma between oil wealth and conservation. In 2007, the government of Rafael Correa put the Yasuní-ITT Initiative to the world: leaving the crude of the ITT block (Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini) underground in exchange for international compensation covering part of the income the country would forgo. The initiative failed to raise the funds and was canceled in 2013, with drilling authorized in a fraction of the park.
A decade later, in August 2023, a historic nationwide referendum decided that the crude of the ITT block should stay beneath the rainforest and ordered the gradual dismantling of the operation. It was one of the first times anywhere in the world that a citizenry voted to give up extracting oil in order to protect nature and peoples in isolation, a global milestone in the defense of the Amazon born precisely in Orellana.
From Coca depart the cruises and expeditions that run down the great Napo river toward the deep rainforest, toward lodges and reserves such as the Limoncocha lagoon, Pañacocha or the Yasuní itself, on some of the most striking nature routes in the Ecuadorian Amazon; the remote Nuevo Rocafuerte, on the border with Peru, marks the eastern limit of the province and of the country.
Orellana combines that ecotourism vocation with the weight of an oil economy that remains both its engine and its conflict, and with the environmental wounds that extraction drags along, such as the great Coca river spill of 2020. The Waorani people, famous for their history of isolation and for their role in the defense of the Yasuní, have become a global symbol of Indigenous resistance to the advance of the extractive frontier, and the province, the stage where much of Ecuador's environmental future is being decided.
Pastaza is the largest province in Ecuador —close to 30,000 km²— and one of the most sparsely populated, with barely a few inhabitants per square kilometer, covered almost entirely by lowland Amazon rainforest. It is home to a remarkable diversity of Indigenous peoples: Amazonian Kichwa, Shuar, Achuar, Waorani, Shiwiar, Andoa and Sápara, each with its own language, its worldview and its deep knowledge of the forest.
The oral and cultural heritage of the Sápara people, one of the most endangered in the Amazon and reduced to a handful of speakers of their language, was proclaimed by Unesco a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001, in recognition of their worldview and of their knowledge of the forest, passed down through dreams and through ayahuasca. That diversity makes Pastaza one of the culturally richest provinces in the country.
Puyo, the provincial capital, was founded on May 12, 1899 by the Dominican missionary Friar Álvaro Valladares together with a group of Indigenous Canelos guides; its name means «mist» or «cloudy» (puyu) in Kichwa, after the damp climate of the foothill rainforest. It is the largest city in the Ecuadorian Amazon and one of its main commercial and service centers, with botanical gardens, riverside boardwalks, wildlife rescue centers and Indigenous communities nearby.
Not far away, the town of Shell owes its name to the Anglo-Dutch oil company that in the 1930s set up a base and an airstrip there to explore the rainforest; that camp was for decades the departure point for the light aircraft heading into the Amazonian interior, and it was from its surroundings that a group of missionaries carried out their work —and met their deaths at the hands of the Waorani, in 1956— giving the region international fame. Puyo and Shell are today the most accessible gateways to the Oriente.
Like the rest of the Oriente, Pastaza lived through the arrival of oil extraction and of colonization, which opened up the rainforest with roads and strained Indigenous territories. The Amazonian peoples of the province have led major struggles in defense of their lands against the advance of the oil frontier, becoming reference points for the Indigenous and environmental movement of Latin America.
Emblematic is the resistance of the Kichwa people of Sarayaku, whose defense of their forest against oil exploration —including the explosives planted in their territory— reached the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which in 2012 ruled in their favor and required the State to repair the damage and to consult Indigenous peoples before intervening in their lands. Sarayaku, with its proposal of «Kawsak Sacha» or «Living Forest», has become a global symbol of the rights of nature.
The province shares with Orellana part of Yasuní National Park, one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet, and a vast stretch of practically untouched rainforest that runs on toward the border with Peru. The Pastaza river and its tributaries, coming down from the Andes toward the Amazon plain, are the great arteries of the province: along them, by canoe and light aircraft, you reach remote communities of the deep rainforest that no road serves.
That status as a last great forest, together with the presence of seven Indigenous nationalities, makes Pastaza a territory of strategic importance for the conservation of the western Amazon, where biodiversity, ancestral knowledge and the tensions of resource extraction all coexist.
Pastaza today combines oil activity and foothill cattle ranching with a nature and culture tourism that offers one of the most authentic encounters with the living Amazon: rainforest routes, wildlife watching, visits to communities, shamanism, caves and the life of its rivers. With four cantons —Pastaza, Mera, Santa Clara and Arajuno— and a little over a hundred thousand inhabitants, it is a province of enormous distances and few people.
The province's great challenge is the difficult balance between exploiting its resources —oil, timber, cattle— and conserving one of the last great intact forests in the country, in a territory where Indigenous peoples remain the protagonists of the defense of the Amazon and of an alternative way of life, rooted in the forest and in their worldview.
The valley of Quito, at the foot of the Pichincha volcano that gives the province its name, was inhabited from remote times by the Quitus and later by the Quitu-Cara confederation, peoples of traders and highland farmers linked by the «mindalás» to the coast and to the rainforest. At the end of the fifteenth century the region was incorporated into the Inca Empire, which made Quito one of its great northern centers; after the death of Huayna Cápac, the city became bound up with the figure of Atahualpa.
When the Spanish arrived under Sebastián de Benalcázar in 1534, general Rumiñahui burned Quito rather than hand it over with its treasures. On those ruins, on December 6, 1534, San Francisco de Quito was refounded, and it would very soon become the political and religious heart of the northern Andes and, in 1563, the seat of the Royal Audiencia.
For almost three centuries, Quito was the capital of the Royal Audiencia and a dazzling artistic center. The Quito School fused European technique with an Indigenous eye and produced a baroque of gold leaf and polychrome that can still be seen in churches such as La Compañía de Jesús and the San Francisco complex; masters such as Bernardo de Legarda and Manuel Chili, «Caspicara», came out of its workshops.
That historic center, the largest and best preserved in Latin America, was in 1978 —together with Kraków— one of the first two sites inscribed by Unesco as a World Cultural Heritage Site. The city also seethed with discontent: the Rebellion of the Barrios of 1765 against Spanish taxes was a foretaste of the Creole spirit that would erupt half a century later.
Pichincha was the stage for the two great milestones of Ecuadorian independence. On August 10, 1809, Quito Creoles led by Juan Pío Montúfar deposed the Spanish authorities and formed a Sovereign Junta in what became known as the «First Cry of Independence», which earned Quito the title of «Light of America»; the repression that followed culminated in the bloody massacre of the patriots on August 2, 1810.
Definitive freedom came on May 24, 1822, when Marshal Antonio José de Sucre defeated the royalists of Melchor Aymerich at the battle of Pichincha, fought on the slopes of the volcano. That victory sealed the independence of the whole former Audiencia and brought it into Simón Bolívar's Gran Colombia.
North of the capital, in the parish of San Antonio de Pichincha, the Ciudad Mitad del Mundo symbolically marks the equatorial line (latitude 0°), in memory of the French Geodesic Mission that between 1736 and 1744 measured the meridian arc there to determine the true shape of the Earth. From those measurements, taken at the foot of the volcanoes by La Condamine, Bouguer, Godin and the Quito-born Pedro Vicente Maldonado, the country took its own name.
Around the monument spread museums, the Pululahua volcano with its inhabited crater and an intense tourist activity that makes zero latitude one of Ecuador's great attractions, where thousands of visitors have their picture taken every year with one foot in each hemisphere.
Coming down the western slope of the cordillera, Pichincha turns into a world of cloud forest. Mindo, ringed by waterfalls, rivers and extraordinary biodiversity, is one of the best places on the planet for watching birds and butterflies, and a center for canopy, tubing and nature tourism a few hours from the capital.
Today Pichincha, with Quito as both national and provincial capital, is the political and administrative heart of Ecuador and one of its largest cultural and economic hubs. The valleys of Los Chillos and Tumbaco, the cable car stations climbing the Pichincha and the volcanoes that surround it round out a province that concentrates much of the country's institutional life.
The Santa Elena peninsula holds one of the oldest archaeological treasures in the Americas: the Las Vegas culture, whose remains go back some 10,000 years and of which more than thirty settlements have been identified on the peninsula. They were hunters, gatherers and early farmers, and from them come the celebrated «Lovers of Sumpa», a pair of skeletons found locked in an embrace, one of the oldest and most moving burials on the continent, displayed today in the museum that bears their name.
Shortly afterwards the Valdivia culture flourished here, the mother of American pottery, whose site at Real Alto reveals one of the first planned villages in the New World, with ceremonial mounds laid out around a plaza. They were followed by Guangala and by the Manteño-Huancavilca confederation, skilled navigators and traders in spondylus. The peninsula is thus one of the great foundations of civilization in present-day Ecuador.
Through the twentieth century the peninsula was a pioneering oil district: some of Ecuador's first wells were drilled at the Ancón field, worked by the British company Anglo-Ecuadorian Oilfields from the start of the century, and there grew up a peculiar English-style «oil town», with its club, its internal railway and its golf course. Salt production in the old salt flats, for its part, gave the resort of Salinas its name.
For a long time the peninsula formed part of Guayas province. On November 7, 2007, after a long-standing local aspiration, it became the province of Santa Elena, the twenty-fourth and one of the youngest in mainland Ecuador, along with Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas. It is made up of three cantons —Santa Elena, Salinas and La Libertad— and some 385,000 inhabitants.
Today Santa Elena is one of the country's great beach areas. Salinas, on the westernmost tip of mainland Ecuador, is the most famous resort, with its long seafront promenade, its marina, its buildings facing the sea and its intense summer life, which draws above all the people of Guayaquil. At its far end, La Chocolatera —the country's westernmost mainland point— offers a spectacle of cliffs, wild surf and sea lions, and is one of the best lookouts for watching humpback whales between June and September.
Further north, on the Spondylus Route, Montañita became Ecuador's mecca of surfing and bohemian life, with its waves, its parties, its hostels and its «cocktail street» that draw travelers from all over the world; its neighbor Olón offers a quieter, more family-friendly version of the same coastline. Nearby, the mud hot springs of San Vicente round out what the peninsular coast has to offer.
The peninsular coast combines beach tourism with artisanal and industrial fishing, one of its traditional economic activities; ports such as Santa Rosa, San Pedro, Anconcito and Chanduy support a sizeable fleet, and the province is home to shipyards and fish processing plants. Salt production, agro-industry and tourism complete a diverse economy.
Every season tens of thousands of visitors reach its beach resorts, and the watching of humpback whales —which come to these warm waters between June and September to mate and give birth— has become one of its great attractions. Between its extraordinarily rich archaeological past, its beaches and its marine nature, Santa Elena has established itself as one of Ecuador's great coastal destinations.
The name of the Spondylus Route, which runs along much of the coast from Santa Elena northwards, evokes the pre-Hispanic trade in the spondylus shell, the red spiny valve that the coastal cultures took from these waters and that was the most prized good in the Andean world, offered to the gods and used as ritual currency and a symbol of fertility. That exchange linked the peoples of the Pacific by sea for millennia.
That heritage lives on today alongside a strong peninsular identity of fishermen and traders, and towns such as Ballenita, Ayangue —with its horseshoe-shaped bay, ideal for diving and for trips to the El Pelado islet— and the inland comunas, which keep up traditions of toquilla straw weaving, pottery and ancestral medicine inherited from their forebears. The province thus projects its millennia-old history as one of its great cultural assets.
The province takes its name from the Tsáchila people, Indigenous inhabitants of the western foothills historically known as the «colorados» (the red ones) for their custom of dyeing their hair a deep red with a paste of achiote, shaping it like a helmet, and painting their bodies with lines of huito. They are considered the heirs of the ancient Yumbos, the peoples who lived on the warm western slopes of the Andes before the conquest.
Heirs to a deep culture of healers and shamans —the «poné», renowned across the country for their cures and cleansings—, the Tsáchila keep their language, Tsafiki, their traditional striped dress, their marimba music and their profound knowledge of the medicinal plants of the forest. Grouped in seven comunas —such as Chigüilpe, Cóngoma or Los Naranjos—, they are the cultural soul of the province and today offer ethnocultural tourism at their centers.
The evangelization of the region began with the Dominican friars, who arrived around the middle of the seventeenth century and from whom the settlement took its name —«Santo Domingo»— joined to that of its «colorado» inhabitants. Around 1750 the Quito scholar Pedro Vicente Maldonado, promoter of the road between Quito and the coast of Esmeraldas, explored and described these forested lands.
Santo Domingo de los Colorados was formally recognized as a parish on November 6, 1899, in the time of Eloy Alfaro, but its great transformation came in the mid-twentieth century. In 1940 the road to Chone was opened, and the routes that linked it to Quito, Guayaquil, Manabí and Esmeraldas turned it into a major crossroads: from barely 7,000 inhabitants in 1950 it grew to more than 30,000 in a few years, in one of the fastest expansions in the country.
For a long time Santo Domingo belonged to the province of Pichincha. After a referendum approved with more than 80% of the vote, in November 2007 it became a province in its own right —Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas—, Ecuador's twenty-third, together with the almost contemporaneous Santa Elena. It is made up of two cantons: Santo Domingo, with the great majority of the population, and La Concordia.
La Concordia was at the center of a peculiar territorial dispute: claimed at once by Esmeraldas and by Santo Domingo, the question of where it belonged was settled by a popular vote in 2012, in which its inhabitants decided to join the new province for good. With around half a million inhabitants, Santo Domingo is today one of the most populous provinces in the country despite its youth.
The province sits in the transition zone between the Andes and the Coast, a humid tropical forest ecosystem that in the past formed part of the exuberant jungle of the equatorial Chocó, one of the rainiest and most biodiverse regions on the planet, home to extraordinarily rich flora and fauna. The colonization and agricultural expansion of the mid-twentieth century drastically reduced those forests.
Reserves and protective forests still survive, however —such as the Tanti forest or the La Perla reserve—, preserving a sample of that original biodiversity, with birds, butterflies and giant trees, and offering nature tourism, trails and river bathing spots a few hours from Quito. Their conservation is today a priority in the face of pressure from the agricultural frontier.
Santo Domingo's economy revolves around the agro-industry of the tropical region: it is one of the country's largest producing areas of African oil palm (palm oil), as well as of plantain, cacao, cassava, abaca and pineapple, with a powerful cattle and dairy sector that makes it one of Ecuador's great milk-producing centers.
Its standing as a great crossroads has turned it into a vibrant hub of commerce, transport and services, with one of the most active markets and logistics centers in the country, through which much of the trade between Ecuador's regions passes. Between that economic drive and the living presence of Tsáchila culture, the province seeks to assert its young identity on the map of Ecuador.
Sucumbíos, in the far northeast of the country, is the ancestral territory of Amazonian peoples such as the Cofán (a'i, speakers of a'ingae), the Siona, the Secoya (Siekopai) and the Kichwa, along with migrant Shuar communities that came from the south. Its name recalls an ancient group of the region, and its history is written to the rhythm of the great rivers —the Aguarico, the San Miguel, the Putumayo— that are part of the Amazon basin.
For centuries it was a remote land of rainforest and frontier, barely touched by the missions and the State, where the Indigenous peoples lived from hunting, fishing, horticulture and a deep knowledge of medicinal plants, with yagé (ayahuasca) at the core of their spirituality. Those rivers were for a long time their only routes of communication with the outside world.
The modern history of Sucumbíos is marked by oil. In 1967 the Texaco-Gulf consortium found crude near present-day Nueva Loja, and in 1972, when the trans-Ecuadorian pipeline (SOTE) that carries oil from the rainforest across the Andes to the Pacific came into operation, Ecuador's oil era began, one that would change the country's economy forever.
The city, popularly known as Lago Agrio —a translation of the English «Sour Lake», the Texas oil field the technicians came from—, was legally founded in 1971 by settlers who came in good part from the province of Loja, from which it took its official name, Nueva Loja. It grew dizzyingly in the heat of drilling and of the colonization that opened up the forest with roads, but that boom also left an enormous environmental liability from the contamination of soils, rivers and communities.
The oil contamination of the northeastern rainforest gave rise to one of the most famous environmental lawsuits in the world: the claim brought by Indigenous and campesino communities against the oil company Texaco (later acquired by Chevron) for the damage caused between the sixties and the nineties, with thousands of open-air crude pits and produced water dumped into the rivers, which left a trail of illness and pollution known as the «Amazonian Chernobyl».
In 2011 a court in Lago Agrio ordered the company to pay damages running into many millions —put at billions of dollars—, but the case turned into a very long international legal battle, with suits and countersuits in courts in several countries, which even today remains not fully resolved. Now a global symbol of the fight for environmental justice, the case keeps Sucumbíos at the center of the debate over the human costs of oil.
Despite everything, Sucumbíos preserves one of the country's great natural treasures: the Cuyabeno Wildlife Production Reserve, a vast system of flooded forest, lagoons and blackwater rivers, home to pink river dolphins, caimans, monkeys, anacondas, macaws and an exuberant biodiversity that makes it one of the most important Amazon ecotourism destinations in Ecuador.
Managed in part by the Indigenous communities themselves —Siona, Secoya, Cofán and Kichwa—, which offer lodges and experiences in the heart of the rainforest, Cuyabeno lets visitors travel by boat among flooded trees, spot wildlife at dusk and learn first-hand about the culture of its peoples. The imposing El Reventador volcano, on the Andean flank of the province, and its reserves round out a natural heritage of the first order.
Sucumbíos is one of the country's youngest provinces: it was created on February 13, 1989, when it split off from Napo, and today it is made up of seven cantons —Lago Agrio, Shushufindi, Cascales, Gonzalo Pizarro, Putumayo, Cuyabeno and Sucumbíos— and some 200,000 inhabitants. Its life is shaped by the border with Colombia, with which it shares rivers, trade, migration and also the effects of the Colombian armed conflict, which for years turned the region into a zone of refuge, of tension and of the presence of irregular groups.
The Cofán, Siona and Secoya peoples, meanwhile, wage a long struggle to defend their territory and their culture against oil pollution and colonization. Between those challenges and the incomparable richness of its rainforest, Sucumbíos is seeking to reinvent itself by betting on ecotourism, environmental restoration and the leading role of its Indigenous communities.
The province of Tungurahua takes its name from the volcano of the same name —the «Black Giant» or «Throat of Fire» in Quichua—, one of the most active in Ecuador, whose silhouette dominates the landscape of the central Sierra. Long before the Incas arrived, the fertile valley was settled by the Hambatos, whom tradition divides into four subgroups —Quisapinchas, Izambas, Guachis and Píllaros—, alongside Panzaleo and Puruhá communities that were masters of working the ecological tiers between the páramo and the temperate valleys.
Around the beginning of the sixteenth century the region was incorporated into the Tahuantinsuyo, and the civil war between the sons of Huayna Cápac passed close by: tradition places near Ambato one of the clashes in which Atahualpa, based in Quito, prevailed over his brother Huáscar. Its volcanic soils, planted with apples, pears, peaches, blackberries and flowers, made Tungurahua the «land of flowers and fruit», an agricultural larder that supplies much of the country.
Sebastián de Benalcázar founded the town of Ambato around 1535, at the crossing of the roads that linked the north and the south of the Royal Audiencia of Quito. During the colonial period the region lived from its textile workshops, from agriculture and from the mule-train trade, and forged an identity as a hard-working city with a strong cultural calling that endures to this day.
Ambato is known as «the Cradle of the Three Juanes» for having given the country three major literary figures of the nineteenth century: the liberal essayist and polemicist Juan Montalvo, scourge of tyrants with his pen; the educator and journalist Juan Benigno Vela; and the writer Juan León Mera, author of the words of the national anthem and of the Indigenist novel «Cumandá». That intellectual tradition made Ambato a cultural beacon of the central Sierra.
On August 5, 1949, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake centered on Pelileo devastated the province and killed around 5,000 people, in one of the greatest catastrophes of Ecuador's twentieth century. Pelileo, Patate, Guano and Píllaro were left in ruins and Ambato suffered very serious damage; the town of Pelileo had to be rebuilt on a new site, giving rise to «old Pelileo» and «new Pelileo».
Out of that tragedy and the will to be reborn came, the following year, the Festival of Fruit and Flowers, held at carnival time. Today it is one of the most famous celebrations in Ecuador, with parades of floats covered in fruit and flowers, the election of the queen, the blessing of the bread and the night-time rounds, and it has become a symbol of the pride of a city that rose from its own rubble.
In a narrow valley at the foot of the Tungurahua volcano, Baños de Agua Santa has earned the title of Ecuador's «adventure capital». Ringed by waterfalls —such as the imposing Pailón del Diablo—, by hot springs welling up from the volcano and by mountains of an intense green, it is the starting point for rafting, zip-lining, cycling along the «Route of the Waterfalls», bungee jumping and trekking; its famous «Swing at the End of the World», hanging over the abyss at the Casa del Árbol, went viral all over the planet.
Because of its position in the transition between the Andes and the jungle it is known as the «Gateway to the Oriente», the antechamber of the Amazon. The eruptive process of the Tungurahua, reactivated in 1999 and prolonged with intense episodes until 2016, forced repeated evacuations and covered the area in ash, testing the resilience of a city that never gave up its calling for tourism.
Tungurahua is today one of the most hard-working and industrious provinces in Ecuador. With Ambato, Cevallos and their surroundings as the epicenter, it concentrates a good part of the national leather and footwear industry, along with tanneries, the manufacture of bodies for buses and trucks and an intense activity of workshops and small factories. The canton of Pelileo, for its part, earned the nickname of «blue city» for its enormous output of jeans and denim garments that are distributed all over the country.
To its industry is added an extremely rich festive and cultural life: the Diablada de Píllaro, a dance of devils held in the first days of January, is Intangible Cultural Heritage of Ecuador. Between its fruit and flower farming, its industrial drive and adventure tourism, the province —head of nine cantons, with a capital, Ambato, of more than 170,000 inhabitants— remains a vital commercial and logistics hub between the Sierra, the Coast and the Oriente.
Zamora, the capital, was founded by the Spanish around 1549 —tradition attributes the founding to Hernando de Barahona, in the context of the expeditions of Gonzalo Pizarro— at the confluence of the Zamora and Yacuambi rivers, drawn there by the region's gold. It proved one of the hardest enclaves to hold on to because of the stubborn resistance of the Amazonian peoples, who destroyed it several times; only in 1921 was it stably resettled by colonists.
The province, in the far southeast of the country, occupies the transition between the southern Andes and the Amazon rainforest, and was for centuries a remote land of frontier, missions and mining, all but forgotten by the central power. Its condition as a crossroads between two natural worlds gave it a singular biodiversity and geography, among cloud-covered mountains, canyons and highland jungles.
Gold mining marked its history, from the colonial washings to the deposits of Nambija, stage of a gold rush in the second half of the 20th century that drew thousands of miners in precarious and dangerous conditions, with collapses that caused numerous victims. Today large-scale industrial mining, with megaprojects such as Fruta del Norte —one of the largest gold mines in the country— and the Mirador copper mine, has put the province back at the center of Ecuador's economic and environmental debate.
Zamora Chinchipe is home to the Shuar people, who keep their language and their organization, and also to Saraguro communities, Kichwa Indigenous people of highland origin who at the end of the 19th century migrated from Azuay and Loja toward the canton of Yacuambi, preserving their distinctive black dress and their Andean traditions in the middle of the jungle, in a remarkable example of blending between the Andean and the Amazonian.
The province was the stage, in its Cordillera del Cóndor, of the Cenepa War with Peru in 1995, one of the last and most intense episodes of the long border dispute between the two countries, fought on jungle terrain of extreme difficulty, among foothills covered in forest and mist where fighting was an ordeal. Positions such as Tiwinza and the southern base were etched into the national memory.
The conflict, in which the Ecuadorian troops fought fiercely, ended up closing with the Brasilia Peace Accords of 1998, which fixed the definitive border and opened a stage of binational integration in this remote region. The creation of the province as such goes back to 1953, when it was separated from the old province of Santiago-Zamora after years of lobbying driven by the Loja-born writer Benjamín Carrión.
Zamora Chinchipe shares with Loja the Podocarpus National Park, a refuge of one of the greatest concentrations of birds and of orchids in the world, with more than six hundred bird species recorded and forests of the romerillo pine that gives the park its name. The province forms part of the Podocarpus-El Cóndor Biosphere Reserve, recognized by Unesco, and holds the Tapichalaca reserve, famous for the jocotoco, a bird discovered for science only in 1997.
Its cloud forests, waterfalls, caverns and rivers of crystalline water such as the Nangaritza —the 'canyon of the Tepuis'— make the province an emerging paradise for ecotourism, birdwatching and nature tourism, with Zamora known as the 'city of birds and waterfalls' and its enormous giant clock on the mountainside as an emblem.
The Cordillera del Cóndor, on the border with Peru, is one of the territories with the greatest endemism on the planet, with unique species of plants, frogs and birds that science keeps discovering on its sandstone plateaus —similar to the tepuis of Venezuela— covered by a singular vegetation adapted to those poor soils.
That same ground hides great mineral riches, and projects such as Fruta del Norte and Mirador have turned Zamora Chinchipe —with barely some 110,000 inhabitants in nine cantons— into one of the leading provinces of large-scale mining in Ecuador. Its future is being played out in a delicate balance between economic development, the rights of the Shuar and Saraguro peoples and the conservation of one of the country's last natural frontiers.