🇪🇨 Ecuador · Sierra (Andean Highlands)
Salinas de Guaranda (officially the parish of Salinas, in the canton of Guaranda, province of Bolívar) is an Andean village set at about 3,550 meters that has become famous across Ecuador for one singular reason: its successful model of solidarity economy. From the 1970s on, its inhabitants —previously very poor and given over to working salt mines— organized dozens of cooperatives and community micro-enterprises that today produce cheeses, chocolates, cured meats, woolen textiles and other handmade products recognized nationwide.
The village's name comes precisely from those old salt mines (the salineras), which for centuries were the area's main livelihood. The transformation of Salinas into a benchmark for cooperativism and fair trade, driven by the community with support from the Church and from aid workers, is an inspiring story that draws visitors interested in rural, community and solidarity tourism.
This guide covers the essentials of Salinas: the visit to its community factories (the cheese plant, the chocolate factory, the cured meats plant, the textile workshops), the old salt mines, the páramo and mountain landscapes around it, and how to get there from Guaranda to see first hand one of the most emblematic community development projects in Ecuador.
For centuries, the people of Salinas lived off working salt mines in conditions of great poverty and dependence on landowners. In the early 1970s, driven by the Salesian priest Antonio Polo and by volunteers and aid workers (among them Italians from Operazione Mato Grosso), the community set out on a process of cooperative organization that transformed the local economy: in 1978 the first cheese plant was born with Swiss technical support, and then came the chocolate factory, the cured meats plant and dozens of community micro-enterprises. Today Salinas, under the El Salinerito brand, is a national and international model of solidarity economy. The full version is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The central highland province of Guaranda, the 'City of the Seven Hills': land of the Chimbo and the Waranka at the foot of Chimborazo, of the most traditional carnival in Ecuador with its Taita Carnaval and its Pájaro Azul, and of the town of Salinas, a world model of solidarity economy under the El Salinerito brand.
Read the history of Bolívar →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Today Salinas de Guaranda is a byword for cheeses and chocolates sold all over Ecuador, but half a century ago it was the exact opposite: one of the poorest and most forgotten villages in the country. For centuries, its life turned on a single resource, the same one that gave it its name: salt. In this remote Andean parish in the province of Bolívar, at about 3,500 meters, springs of salty water rose from the ground and the inhabitants extracted salt from them through a laborious process of evaporation. Those salineras were the community's main livelihood.
Working the salt, however, did not translate into wellbeing. On the contrary, for a long time Salinas was one of the poorest and most forgotten places in Ecuador. The land and the mines largely belonged to a handful of people, and the Indigenous and peasant population worked in conditions of great precariousness and dependence, with high rates of illiteracy, malnutrition and infant mortality. Salt, paradoxically, was at once the wealth of the place and the symbol of its misery.
That starting point —a cold, isolated, impoverished village at altitude, tied to working salt— is essential to grasping the scale of the transformation that would follow. The story of Salinas is, above all, the story of how a community sunk in poverty managed to change its fate through collective organization.
The great turning point in the history of Salinas began in the early 1970s, with the arrival of an Italian-born Salesian missionary, Father Antonio Polo, and the support of volunteers and aid workers. Rather than limiting themselves to handouts, the approach was to encourage the community itself to organize and take its economic development into its own hands, on the basis of the principles of cooperativism and solidarity economy.
The first steps were the creation of a savings and credit cooperative and, above all, the setting up of a small community cheese plant, which used the local milk to make quality cheeses. That pioneering cheese plant showed that collective organization could generate income and jobs sustainably, and it became the seed of the whole model. Out of it grew new community micro-enterprises: chocolate making, cured meats, spinning mills and woolen textiles, drying plants, jams and many more.
The key to the model was that ownership and profits stayed in the hands of the community, organized into cooperatives and groups, instead of concentrating in a few owners. Education, training and the reinvestment of profits in the community itself made it possible to break the cycle of poverty. In a few decades, Salinas went from a wretched village of salt mines to a dynamic cluster of solidarity enterprises, under the umbrella brand 'El Salinerito'.
The consolidation of the Salinas model would not have been possible without a network of technical and solidarity support that joined the community's own organizing. International cooperation played a decisive part, Swiss cooperation above all: cheesemaking technicians who came from Switzerland taught the people of Salinas to make European-style aged cheeses, which allowed a leap in quality and opened markets in the country's cities. The first community cheese plant, set up around 1978, was the model later replicated in dozens of communities across the Ecuadorian highlands.
To that cooperation were added Italian volunteers linked to Operazione Mato Grosso and to the Salesian family, along with fair trade organizations that helped place the Salinas products in national and international markets. Over time, the different activities were grouped into second-tier organizations —such as the Fundación Familia Salesiana Salinas, the production cooperative and the corporation that brings the micro-enterprises together— under the umbrella brand 'El Salinerito'.
That institutional fabric was key to keeping the model from depending on a single person or on permanent outside help. Constant training, the reinvestment of profits and the creation of a brand identity of its own allowed Salinas to go from local experiment to a benchmark replicated across much of rural Ecuador, exporting not only cheeses and chocolates but also a method of community development.
Today Salinas de Guaranda is cited in Ecuador and beyond as one of the most successful examples of community development and solidarity economy in Latin America. Its products —especially the aged cheeses, the chocolates, the cured meats and the woolen textiles— are sold all over the country and have won recognition for their quality. The set of micro-enterprises employs a good share of the population and has raised the community's standard of living, education and health markedly.
That success turned the village itself into a rural and community tourism destination. More and more visitors —students, researchers, travelers, delegations— come to Salinas to see first hand how the model works, tour the factories, watch the production processes, buy the products and learn from an experience that has been studied as a development case. The community accordingly put together a tourism offer that includes guided tours, lodging and food.
The story of Salinas goes beyond economics: it is an account of dignity, organization and hope, of how a community managed to transform its reality without waiting for outside solutions. For the traveler, visiting Salinas is not just seeing a pretty páramo village, but getting close to an inspiring human experience, where the salt of the old days gave way to the cheese, the chocolate and the wool of a future built together.
The success of Salinas does not mean its story is free of challenges. Like any solidarity economy experience, the model faces tensions that come with growth: competition from cheaper industrial products, the need to keep up quality and food safety to compete in demanding markets, generational handovers in the leadership of the cooperatives, and the risk that commercial success may dilute the original community spirit. Keeping the balance between being competitive businesses and remaining solidarity organizations is a permanent challenge.
The departure or retirement of founding figures, such as Father Antonio Polo himself —who devoted decades to the project—, also raises the question of how to sustain the model over time without depending on particular individuals. The answer from Salinas has been to bet on institutions, on training new local leaders and on diversifying activities, community tourism included, which brings in income and spreads the experience.
Beyond the numbers, the legacy of Salinas is above all symbolic. Its history showed that a rural Andean community, starting from extreme poverty and from working salt, could collectively build a decent future. That account of organization, dignity and hope turned Salinas into a reference studied by universities, governments and development organizations around the world. For the traveler arriving today in this páramo village, knowing its history means understanding that behind every cheese, every chocolate and every woolen garment lies one of the most inspiring experiences of social transformation in Ecuador.