Travel and Tourism in Ecuador

Quito: The City in the Clouds

Of all the cities in the Americas that were founded during the Spanish colonial period, none has preserved its historic heart as completely and magnificently as Quito. The UNESCO World Heritage designation of 1978, which recognized Quito alongside Kraków as one of the first cities in the world to receive this protection, was awarded in recognition of a colonial city center exceptional not only for its scale and completeness but for the quality and artistic significance of the architecture it contains.

Quito's historic centre, known simply as the Centro Histórico, spreads across a series of gentle hills and shallow valleys in the city's oldest district, its streets following the grid plan laid down by the Spanish founders in the sixteenth century and its buildings reflecting four centuries of architectural evolution. The cityscape is dominated by the towers and domes of religious buildings, and the concentration of significant churches, convents, and monasteries in the Centro Histórico is unmatched in the Americas. More than 40 churches, several convents and monasteries, and hundreds of significant civic buildings are packed into this relatively compact area, creating an architectural museum of extraordinary depth and richness.

The Plaza Grande, officially Plaza de la Independencia, forms the heart of the Centro Histórico. The plaza is surrounded by four of the most important buildings in the country: the Palacio de Carondelet, the presidential palace that has served as the seat of executive power since colonial times; the Metropolitan Cathedral, begun in the 1560s and containing the remains of several historical figures including the liberator Sucre; the Archbishop's Palace, now partially occupied by restaurants and shops; and the Municipal Palace. At the center of the plaza stands a winged figure representing independence atop a tall column, and the space is filled throughout the day with citizens, vendors, tourists, and the ceremonial changing of the guard at the presidential palace.

The Compañía de Jesús, one block from the Plaza Grande, is the undisputed jewel of Quito's colonial architecture and one of the most magnificent religious buildings in all of Latin America. Built by the Jesuits over 160 years between 1605 and 1765, the church is a masterpiece of Baroque extravagance. The façade, executed in locally quarried volcanic andesite stone, is an overwhelming composition of columns, niches, carved figures, scrollwork, and ornamental detail arranged in three registers rising to an elaborate pediment. The interior is if anything even more spectacular, every surface covered in carved wood, gold leaf, and polychrome decoration, with ten side altars and a main altar of breathtaking complexity. The effect is of entering a golden cave where religious art and architecture have merged into a single overwhelming sensory experience.

The Church of San Francisco, the largest colonial complex in Quito and one of the largest in South America, occupies an entire city block adjacent to a large plaza. Founded by the Franciscans immediately after the Spanish conquest, the church and its associated convent and cloister represent the earliest phase of colonial construction in Quito and contain important examples of Quito School art as well as architectural elements showing indigenous influences. The ceiling of the main church nave employs a distinctive carved wooden technique called artesonado, adapted by indigenous craftsmen working under Franciscan supervision to create a uniquely mestizo aesthetic that is one of the hallmarks of Quito colonial art.

La Merced, Santo Domingo, and San Agustín churches all reward exploration. La Merced is notable for its fine cloister and its collection of paintings depicting natural disasters in colonial Quito including volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Santo Domingo houses remarkable Quito School sculptures. San Agustín was the site where the patriot leaders signed the first Quito declaration of independence in 1809.

El Panecillo, a prominent hilltop that rises from within the Centro Histórico and is visible from most of the city, is crowned by one of Quito's most iconic landmarks: a large aluminum sculpture of the Virgin of Quito, a winged version of the Virgin Mary based on an eighteenth-century Quito School sculpture by the master craftsman Manuel Chili, known as Caspicara. The aluminum virgin, installed in 1975, stands approximately 45 meters tall and serves as a beacon visible from throughout the city. The hilltop offers panoramic views over Quito and the surrounding Andean valley, with volcanic peaks providing a dramatic backdrop.

The Barrio La Floresta, northeast of the Centro Histórico, represents a different face of Quito: a neighborhood of early twentieth-century houses that has become the city's bohemian artistic quarter, lined with independent cafes, galleries, bookshops, and restaurants. La Mariscal district to the north has long been the traditional expat and tourist hub of Quito, earning the nickname Gringolandia for its concentration of hostels, international restaurants, bars, and travel agencies catering to international visitors.

For the most dramatic perspective on Quito's extraordinary setting, visitors should not miss the TelefériQo, a gondola cable car that ascends from the western edge of the city to a station on the slopes of Pichincha volcano at approximately 4,050 meters in about eight minutes. The view from the upper station, looking east over the long narrow valley containing Quito with the city stretching for miles and other Andean ranges visible beyond, is one of the great urban panoramas in the world. Fit and acclimatized visitors can continue on foot or horseback from the cable car station to the volcanic crater rim at approximately 4,696 meters, though the thin air at these altitudes makes even moderate exertion significantly more demanding than at sea level.

The Museo del Banco Central del Ecuador, now reorganized as several museums including the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana collection, houses the most important collection of pre-Columbian art and historical artifacts in Ecuador. The pre-Columbian gold room contains extraordinary examples of Andean goldwork, including nose ornaments, drinking vessels, and ceremonial objects from the Valdivia, La Tolita, Chorrera, and other ancient Ecuadorian cultures. The colonial art collection includes major works from the Quito School period. The museum's republican and modern art collections document the evolution of Ecuadorian visual culture from independence through the twentieth century.

The Mercado Central and other traditional markets of Quito offer travelers an immersive experience of everyday Ecuadorian urban life. The Mercado Central, located near the Centro Histórico, is one of the best places in Ecuador to eat traditional highland food, with dozens of stalls serving encebollado fish soup, hornado roast pork, llapingachos potato cakes, and locro de papa soup at very low prices. Shopping markets like the Mercado Iñaquito in the north of the city sell everything from fresh Andean produce to artisan goods, providing a counterpoint to the more tourist-oriented craft shops of the historic center.

The Galápagos Islands: Darwin's Laboratory

The Galápagos Islands are one of those places that do not merely live up to their reputation but genuinely exceed it, delivering to the visitor an experience so far outside ordinary reality that most people find themselves unable to adequately describe it after returning home. The islands are not beautiful in the conventional travel destination sense. Many of the landscapes are stark and almost lunar, fields of black lava stretching to a horizon broken by the occasional cactus or the silhouette of a marine iguana. The ocean is often cold. The weather can be gray and drizzly. And yet the islands are almost unanimously described by those who visit them as the most extraordinary place they have ever been, because the wildlife encounters they offer are simply impossible to replicate anywhere else on Earth.

The reason lies in the evolutionary history of the archipelago's fauna. Having evolved in the absence of significant terrestrial predators, the animals of the Galápagos simply do not have a fear response to large approaching objects, including humans. A visitor walking along a beach path may have to step around sleeping sea lions as though they were large, uncooperative bags. Blue-footed boobies nest in the middle of walking trails and will not move for approaching visitors, requiring people to walk carefully around the birds rather than the other way around. Marine iguanas pile on top of each other on every available rock surface in scenes of apparently cheerful mutual inconvenience. Galápagos hawks will land on an outstretched arm. The effect is of walking through a wildlife documentary where the animals have never learned to perform the behavior of fleeing.

Charles Darwin arrived at the Galápagos in September 1835 aboard HMS Beagle, on a voyage of scientific discovery around the world. He spent five weeks in the archipelago, collecting specimens of birds, reptiles, plants, and insects on several islands. It was only after returning to England and consulting ornithologist John Gould about his bird specimens that Darwin realized the birds he had collected from different islands, which he had initially assumed were similar varieties of the same species, were in fact distinct species that had each adapted to the particular conditions of their home island. This insight, combined with observations about the tortoises and mockingbirds he had also collected from different islands, contributed fundamentally to Darwin's development of the theory of natural selection, which he published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, 24 years after his visit to the archipelago.

The Galápagos National Park was established in 1959, the centennial year of the publication of On the Origin of Species, and today protects approximately 97 percent of the land area of the archipelago. The Charles Darwin Research Station was established on Santa Cruz Island in 1964 as a scientific research and conservation facility. The Galápagos Marine Reserve, established in 1998, protects one of the largest marine protected areas in the world, a zone of approximately 133,000 square kilometers of ocean surrounding the islands. Together, these protected areas constitute one of the most carefully managed and scientifically monitored natural heritage sites on Earth. In 1978, the Galápagos became one of the first UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the world.

Key Galápagos Islands

Santa Cruz is the most visited island in the Galápagos and the hub of the archipelago's tourist infrastructure. Puerto Ayora, its main town, is the largest settlement in the Galápagos and home to the Charles Darwin Research Station, where visitors can observe giant tortoise breeding enclosures and learn about the station's conservation programs. The highlands of Santa Cruz, accessible by road from Puerto Ayora, offer encounters with free-roaming giant tortoises, cloud forest birds, and dramatic volcanic sinkholes known as Los Gemelos.

Isabela is the largest island in the Galápagos by a significant margin, comprising about half of the archipelago's total land area and formed by the coalescence of six separate shield volcanoes into a single landmass. Its sheer size gives it an ecological diversity unusual even by Galápagos standards. The island's varied habitats include mangrove lagoons where sea turtles breed, penguin colonies on the rocky western coast, giant tortoise populations in the highlands, and the extraordinary caldera of Sierra Negra volcano, one of the largest active calderas in the world at 10 kilometers in diameter.

Fernandina is the youngest and most volcanically active island in the Galápagos and is considered the most pristine major island in the archipelago, having never been settled or permanently inhabited by humans and being completely free of introduced mammal species. The island's Punta Espinoza is one of the finest wildlife viewing sites in the entire archipelago, where marine iguanas crowd every available surface and flightless cormorants nest beside the visitor trail.

Española Island, at the southeastern tip of the archipelago, is one of the oldest in the Galápagos and contains some of the most extraordinary wildlife concentrations in the islands. Punta Suárez, a rocky promontory at the island's western end, hosts a breeding colony of waved albatrosses, the densely packed nesting sites of Nazca boobies, colonies of marine iguanas with their distinctive red and green Christmas coloring, sea lions in boisterous social groups, and a spectacular blowhole where the ocean surges through a lava tube to shoot a column of spray twenty meters into the air. Gardner Bay on the same island offers a sweep of white sand beach with a resident sea lion colony where the animals are so uninhibited by human presence that they will approach and investigate visitors with apparent curiosity.

San Cristóbal is the easternmost island in the Galápagos and the seat of the provincial capital, Puerto Baquerizo Moreno. The town beach, Playa Mann, is permanently inhabited by a sea lion colony whose members treat the beach as their personal territory and regard the humans who share it with them as moderately interesting but fundamentally irrelevant. Visitors to the interpretation center in Puerto Baquerizo Moreno can access an excellent museum documenting the natural and human history of the Galápagos.

Bartolomé is one of the most photographed locations in the entire Galápagos, its moonscape of volcanic spatter cones, lava flows, and the iconic Pinnacle Rock providing a landscape so dramatic and otherworldly that it has come to represent the visual signature of the archipelago. The view from the summit of Bartolomé across the channel to Santiago Island, with Pinnacle Rock in the foreground, is perhaps the most reproduced photograph from the Galápagos. The beach below Pinnacle Rock is one of the most reliable places in the archipelago to encounter Galápagos penguins.

North Seymour, a small flat island just north of Baltra, is one of the best places in the Galápagos for concentrated seabird observation, hosting breeding colonies of magnificent frigatebirds and blue-footed boobies at such density that the visitor trail passes within centimeters of nesting birds. Sea lions are also present in large numbers. Genovesa Island, known as Bird Island, is located at the far northeastern edge of the archipelago and is the premier destination for seabird enthusiasts, hosting red-footed boobies, Nazca boobies, magnificent frigatebirds, and one of the largest Galápagos storm-petrel colonies in the world, along with the fascinating Darwin's finches for which the island's Darwin Bay beach has become famous among birders.

Wolf and Darwin islands, at the far northern edge of the Galápagos, are accessible only to dive-liveaboard operators and represent among the finest diving destinations in the world. The convergence of cold nutrient-rich Humboldt Current water with warmer equatorial water in this region creates extraordinary conditions for marine life, attracting large aggregations of whale sharks, hammerhead sharks, schooling hammerheads in numbers that can reach hundreds of individuals, Galápagos sharks, manta rays, and large pelagic fish species.

Cotopaxi National Park

Cotopaxi National Park, established in 1975, protects the volcano and its surrounding ecosystems and is one of the most visited natural areas in Ecuador, easily accessible on a day trip from Quito. The park encompasses not only the volcano itself but also a broad expanse of high páramo grasslands, shallow lakes, and the distinctive ecological community that has adapted to life at altitudes above 3,500 meters. The páramo is an extraordinary ecosystem found only in the tropical Andes, a world of low-growing grasses, cushion plants, giant Polylepis trees, and the remarkable frailejón plants whose woolly leaves trap moisture from the frequent mist and fog.

Visitors to Cotopaxi National Park can drive to a parking area at approximately 4,500 meters, from which a path leads upward across a field of volcanic ash and cinder to the edge of the glacier at around 4,800 meters. The walk to the glacier, while not technically demanding in terms of skill, is physically strenuous due to the extreme altitude and the unstable volcanic surface, and requires good physical condition and some degree of acclimatization. The view from the glacier's edge, looking up the steep white slope of the summit cone above and out over the vast highland landscape below, is one of the defining experiences of highland Ecuador.

For the more adventurous, Cotopaxi offers opportunities for mountaineering to the summit at 5,897 meters, though this is a serious mountaineering undertaking requiring proper equipment, physical preparation, guide support, and favorable weather conditions. The summit ascent typically begins around midnight from the José Ribas mountain hut at 4,800 meters, with climbers moving through the dark across glaciated terrain to reach the summit crater at sunrise. The technical difficulty of the route is moderate for experienced mountaineers, but the extreme altitude makes it a significant challenge.

Lower-intensity activities in and around Cotopaxi National Park include horseback riding across the páramo, cycling down the flanks of the volcano (rentable bikes and guided tours operate from the park entrance area), wildlife spotting for the Andean condor, Andean fox, wild horses descended from colonial Spanish stock, and the various duck, ibis, and wading bird species that frequent the park's lakes.

Cinco Sitios Patrimonio de la Humanidad

Ecuador has five UNESCO World Heritage Sites, a remarkable number for a country of its size and a reflection of the extraordinary concentration of natural and cultural significance within its borders.

The Galápagos Islands were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978, among the first natural sites to receive this designation anywhere in the world, and the protected area was extended in 2001 to include the Galápagos Marine Reserve as a recognized component. The designation recognizes the islands as an outstanding example of ongoing evolutionary and ecological processes, the site of Darwin's foundational observations, and one of the most important natural history sites in the world.

The City of Quito was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978, the same year as the Galápagos, making Ecuador one of the first countries in the world to have both natural and cultural properties on the World Heritage List. The designation recognizes Quito's colonial city center as the best-preserved and most complete colonial urban fabric in the Americas.

Sangay National Park was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983, recognized for its exceptional natural beauty, its extraordinary biodiversity, and its geological significance as a site of active volcanism. The park encompasses both Sangay and Tungurahua volcanoes, as well as a vast expanse of Amazonian foothills with exceptional species richness.

The Historic Centre of Santa Ana de los Ríos de Cuenca was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999, recognized for its exceptionally well-preserved colonial urban fabric, its harmonious integration of natural landscape and built environment along the banks of the Tomebamba River, and its living traditions of craftsmanship including Panama hat weaving and Ikat textile production.

The Qhapaq Ñan, the Andean Road System of the Inca Empire, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014, shared among the six Andean nations through whose territory the system passes: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. The Qhapaq Ñan, which runs through the highlands of Ecuador from the Colombian border to the Peruvian border and extends over more than 30,000 kilometers across the entire extent of the former Inca Empire, is recognized as one of the greatest feats of pre-Columbian infrastructure engineering and as a route of continuing cultural significance for the indigenous peoples of the Andes.

Festivals and Cultural Events

Ecuador's calendar is rich with festivals that blend pre-Columbian indigenous traditions with Catholic religious observances in the syncretic fashion characteristic of Andean culture generally. Many of these festivals are spectacular public events that offer travelers extraordinary insight into living Ecuadorian cultural traditions.

Inti Raymi, the Inca festival of the sun celebrated around the summer solstice in late June, is one of the most important indigenous festivals in Ecuador and is celebrated most spectacularly in the communities around Otavalo and in the Cotacachi area. The festival involves days of communal dancing, music, ritual bathing, processions, and ceremonies that honor the sun and the harvest, and can bring entire towns to a halt as participants in traditional dress fill the streets in scenes of extraordinary color and energy.

Carnaval, celebrated in the week before Lent, is marked throughout Ecuador with water fights, music, and dancing, with the celebration in Guaranda and the surrounding Bolivar province being particularly famous for its traditional character and the quality of its chaguarmishqui, a fermented drink made from the juice of the agave plant. The Carnaval of Ambato, known as the Festival of Flowers and Fruits, takes a more cultivated form with elaborate flower and fruit exhibitions and parades.

The Día de los Difuntos, the Day of the Dead celebrated on November 2, is observed throughout Ecuador with visits to cemeteries, the preparation of colada morada, a traditional purple corn drink flavored with fruit and spices that is prepared specially for this occasion, and the baking of guaguas de pan, bread figures in the shape of swaddled infants that are eaten as part of the commemoration. The cemetery ceremonies at indigenous communities in the highlands, where families spend the night beside their ancestors' graves with food, music, and candles, provide some of the most moving cultural spectacles available to visitors in Ecuador.

The founding anniversary of Quito on December 6 is celebrated with a week of festivities including bullfights, concerts, street parties, and cultural events throughout the capital, and the city takes on a particularly festive character during the Fiestas de Quito that surround this date.