Ecuador: Regions, Cities & Travel Guide

What is Ecuador known for?

Ecuador carries four worlds at once: the Pacific coast, the high Andes, the Amazon in the east, and the Galápagos Islands far out in the ocean. Quito, the capital, and the port of Guayaquil anchor its cities, while colonial Cuenca holds the south. Volcanoes define the middle.

Cotopaxi and Chimborazo rise along the corridor Alexander von Humboldt named the Avenue of the Volcanoes.

Where is Ecuador?

Ecuador is a compact country in northwestern South America, bordered by Colombia to the north, Peru to the east and south, and the Pacific Ocean along its western edge. Its land falls into four sharply different worlds. The Costa, a belt of hot lowlands and mangrove, runs behind the Pacific shore and holds the port of Guayaquil.

Inland the ground climbs fast into the Sierra, the double spine of the Andes that carries Quito and Cuenca on a string of high basins between two mountain walls. Volcanoes crowd this corridor. Cotopaxi, among the highest active volcanoes on earth, and Chimborazo, whose summit stands farther from the planet's centre than any other point because of the equatorial bulge, both rise along the highland avenue that Alexander von Humboldt mapped two centuries ago.

East of the mountains the land drops again into the Oriente, the Amazon lowlands drained by headwater rivers of the great basin, dense with rainforest and among the most biologically diverse ground anywhere. Far out in the Pacific, roughly a thousand kilometres west of the mainland, lie the volcanic Galápagos Islands, a province and a marine reserve in their own right. Coast, highland, jungle, and islands sit within a single small republic.

The contrast is the whole point.

What is the history of Ecuador?

Long before Spain arrived, the peoples of the northern Andes were drawn into the Inca Empire, which pushed up through the Sierra in the late fifteenth century and made Quito a northern seat of its power. That order fell within a generation. Spanish forces under Francisco Pizarro overthrew the Inca in the 1530s, and the highland audiencia of Quito was governed from afar, first under the Viceroyalty of Peru and later New Granada.

Colonial rule held for nearly three centuries. The break began in Quito. On the tenth of August 1809 a group of the city's leading citizens seized the local government, an early cry for self-rule that Ecuadorians still mark as their first step toward independence.

The decisive stroke came on the slopes above the capital. At the Battle of Pichincha in 1822, Antonio José de Sucre routed the royalist army and secured the highlands for the patriot cause. Ecuador then entered Gran Colombia, the union Simón Bolívar had forged with present-day Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama.

The federation frayed under regional rivalries. In 1830 Ecuador left it to stand as a separate republic, and Quito has been its capital ever since.

What is Ecuador like?

Ecuador wears its indigenous inheritance openly, especially through the Kichwa highland peoples whose language is a branch of the tongue the Inca once spread across the Andes. Nowhere is that clearer than Otavalo. Its Saturday market, one of the largest indigenous markets in the Americas, draws weavers in embroidered blouses and felt hats selling textiles their families have made for generations.

Spanish is the working language of government and the street, yet Kichwa and Shuar stay alive in the highlands and the Amazon, and it is common to hear two of them braided into one conversation. Food tracks the geography. The coast around Guayaquil lives on ceviche and encebollado, the hangover soup of tuna and yuca, while the Sierra leans on hominy, potatoes, and roast cuy served on feast days.

Devotion runs through it all. In Baños de Agua Santa, pilgrims still climb to the shrine of the Virgin below the volcano Tungurahua, and highland towns keep festival calendars that fold Catholic saints into far older harvest and solstice rites. Music, weaving, and the fine Panama hat, woven in Cuenca despite the misleading name, carry the same layered past.

One country holds many peoples.

What is the climate of Ecuador?

The Equator sets less of the weather here than the height of the land. On the coast around Guayaquil the climate is tropical, hot and wet, with a rainier stretch early in the year. Up in the Sierra, altitude keeps Quito and Cuenca mild by day and cold after dark, spring-like the year round rather than tropical.

The Amazon in the east stays warm and humid, soaked by frequent rain. Weather here is a matter of elevation.

How do you get to Ecuador?

Two airports carry almost every arrival. Quito's Mariscal Sucre, high in the Andes, is the busier of the pair and the usual entry for the highlands, while José Joaquín de Olmedo in Guayaquil handles the coast and the largest share of traffic bound for the islands. Reaching the Galápagos means a domestic flight that touches down in Guayaquil to refuel before crossing the ocean.

Distances on the mainland are short. Most travellers hop between regions by bus or a quick internal flight.