🇪🇨 Ecuador · Amazon (Oriente)
Macas is the capital of Morona Santiago province, a quiet city in the southern Ecuadorian Amazon, set in the foothills where the Andes drop away towards the rainforest, on the banks of the Upano river. Warm and easygoing, it is the main service center of the southeast and the natural base for exploring Sangay National Park, the Upano river and the rich culture of the Shuar people.
Known historically as 'la Esmeralda Oriental' (the Eastern Emerald) for its green setting and its climate, Macas combines the character of a provincial Amazon city with surroundings of great beauty: the imposing Sangay volcano (a World Heritage site) on the horizon, the valleys and waterfalls of the Upano, and the living presence of Shuar culture, one of the best-known Indigenous nationalities of the Amazon.
This guide covers the essentials of Macas: its cathedral and the Quílamo lookout over the Upano river, Sangay National Park as the great natural destination, the waterfalls, caves and Shuar communities around it, the adventure options on the river, and how to reach this quiet destination in Ecuador's southern Amazon.
The Macas region is the ancestral territory of the Shuar people, famous for their warrior culture and their resistance to colonization. The city has very old origins as a Spanish and missionary outpost in the rainforest (linked to the legendary Sevilla del Oro and to the image of the Virgen Purísima de Macas), and it later grew with missionary activity and the colonization of the Oriente. Today it is the capital of Morona Santiago and the gateway to Sangay National Park. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Amazonian province of the southeast: land of the Shuar people, with an active volcano and Sangay National Park —World Heritage Site—, the millennia-old Upano culture and Macas as the capital of the foothills.
Read the history of Morona Santiago →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In 1599, historical tradition tells us, the Shuar entered the Spanish town of Logroño de los Caballeros, seized the governor Ramírez de Arellano and killed him by pouring molten gold down his throat, reproaching him for the greed for the metal that had enslaved them in the mines. That same uprising also destroyed Sevilla del Oro, and its few survivors fled to the right bank of the Upano river, where they consolidated a small settlement we know today as Macas. Few cities in Ecuador have an origin so brutal and so cinematic.
The southeastern region of Ecuador, where Macas sits, is the heart of the territory of the Shuar people, one of the best-known and most emblematic Indigenous nationalities of the Amazon. The Shuar have lived in these forests and Andean foothills since time immemorial, and they developed a culture with a strong identity, deeply tied to the rainforest, to its rivers and to a rich spiritual worldview peopled with beings and forces of nature.
The Shuar are famous for their warrior character and for their stubborn defense of their autonomy. Through their history they put up remarkable resistance to attempts at domination, by the Incas and, above all, by the Spanish. The great rebellion of 1599 against the mining towns of Logroño and Sevilla del Oro was not an isolated event but the culmination of successive uprisings against the regime of forced labor in the gold mines. That resistance secured them more than two centuries of autonomy and kept the region largely outside colonial control.
Shuar culture also became known abroad —sometimes in sensationalist terms— for old ritual practices associated with war, such as head shrinking (tsantsa). Beyond those stereotypes, the essential point is that the Shuar managed to preserve their identity, their language and their territory against enormous pressure, and today they are a living, proud people, central to the identity of Morona Santiago and of the Macas region.
Macas has one of the oldest —and most legendary— origins among the towns of Ecuador's Oriente. The area was tied to Spanish attempts to exploit the gold of the southern Amazon region, around settlements such as Sevilla del Oro and Logroño de los Caballeros, mining outposts chasing wealth in Shuar territory. Those enclaves had a fleeting boom and a dramatic end: the Shuar rebellion of 1599 razed them, and the survivors of Sevilla del Oro fell back to the right bank of the Upano to consolidate Macas. That episode wrapped the region in an aura of remote, rich and dangerous land.
Macas endured, however, as a small and isolated settlement of Spanish origin in the middle of the rainforest, sustained for centuries almost alone. Its history was marked by intense religious devotion, symbolized by the image of the Virgen Purísima de Macas, around which legends and traditions were woven that gave the community cohesion and identity over time. Faith and isolation forged the particular character of this old eastern town.
Through the colonial and republican periods, the region was also the scene of missionary work, especially by missionaries seeking to evangelize the Shuar and other peoples. That missionary activity, along with the small Spanish-mestizo population of Macas, was one of the few permanent non-Indigenous presences in a region that, in large part, remained the domain of the rainforest and its peoples until relatively recent times.
A decisive chapter in the history of Macas and of the whole Shuar region was the arrival of the Salesian missionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From 1893, the Catholic Church entrusted the Salesian Congregation with the evangelization of the Apostolic Vicariate of Méndez and Gualaquiza, which covered southeastern Ecuador. The Salesians set up missions, schools, workshops and boarding schools in the region, in a process that profoundly transformed the life of the Amazon peoples.
The missionary work had an ambivalent character that history now recognizes with nuance: on the one hand, it helped curb abuses by settlers and rubber traders and helped document and preserve part of the Shuar language and culture; on the other, it drove settlement in fixed villages, schooling in Spanish and religious conversion, altering ancestral ways of life. Missionaries such as those who travelled and described the region also left valuable ethnographic and geographical records of a territory that was then almost unknown.
Out of that missionary impulse there emerged, in time, one of the most important Indigenous organizations on the continent: the Federación Interprovincial de Centros Shuar, founded in 1964 with Salesian support, a pioneer in defending the rights and the territory of its people. Macas, the seat of much of this activity, was marked forever by the Salesian imprint, visible in its churches, its schools and in the very social fabric of the city.
The integration of Macas and the southeastern region into the rest of Ecuador accelerated in the 20th century, with the intensification of missionary work, the opening of roads and the colonization of the Amazon. Those roads pulled Macas out of its centuries-old isolation, connecting it with the highlands (Cuenca, Riobamba) and with other Amazon cities, and allowed it to grow as a town. In 1953 the province of Morona Santiago was created, and Macas was named its capital, cementing its role as the main urban, commercial and service center of the southern Amazon.
The region also became famous for singular episodes, such as the expeditions to the enigmatic Cueva de los Tayos, in Shuar territory, which in the 1970s drew researchers, soldiers and adventurers from several countries in search of supposed treasures and mysteries, and which contributed to the international fame —often mythologized— of this remote corner of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Today Macas looks to nature and culture tourism as one of its callings. Its status as the gateway to Sangay National Park —declared a Natural World Heritage site in 1983, with the imposing active volcano on the horizon—, its waterfalls, the Upano river with its potential for adventure and the living Shuar culture make it a destination in the deep Ecuador, where colonial history, Indigenous resistance, missionary heritage and the exuberance of the southern Amazon rainforest all meet.