Provincia de Esmeraldas, Ecuador — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Provincia de Esmeraldas known for?

Provincia de Esmeraldas meets Colombia along its northern border and the Pacific Ocean along its western one, and it carries Afro-Ecuadorian culture more visibly than anywhere else in the country. Esmeraldas is capital and largest city. The city gives the province its name, its administration and its main point of contact with the sea, which is why almost every route into Provincia de Esmeraldas ends up passing through it.

Where is Provincia de Esmeraldas?

Five provinces and a country ring it. Imbabura and Carchi lie to the east, Manabí, Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas and Pichincha to the south, Colombia along the northern border, and the Pacific Ocean takes the whole western edge. That is a lot of frontier.

Provincia de Esmeraldas covers a long stretch of that shoreline, and the distance between the Colombian border and the Manabí line is enough that the province behaves as several coastlines rather than one. The capital sits on the coast. Esmeraldas is the largest city as well as the seat of government, and its position on the water is why the province's contact with the outside arrives by sea more readily than over the inland routes toward Imbabura and Carchi.

The interior is the other half. Ground running back from the Pacific Ocean toward Pichincha and Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas belongs to the same province as the beaches, and it is the part visitors rarely see. Esmeraldas was constituted in 1847.

Ecuador drew the province early, and the outline that resulted still explains why a traveller crossing it can pass from a Colombian border town to a Manabí boundary without leaving one administrative unit.

What is Provincia de Esmeraldas like?

Afro-Ecuadorian culture belongs to this coast. Provincia de Esmeraldas is where that culture is identified with a place rather than with a diaspora, and the distinction matters to how the province understands itself against the rest of Ecuador. Spanish carries the province's everyday business.

It runs the offices in Esmeraldas, the schools and the border traffic with Colombia, and a visitor will find it sufficient anywhere in the province. Proximity to Colombia counts for something. A province that shares a frontier with another country, and that is one of only three in Ecuador to do so, accumulates habits and connections that provinces further inland do not.

The sea does the same. The Pacific Ocean on the western edge has given Esmeraldas a maritime orientation that the inland neighbours, Imbabura and Carchi among them, simply do not share. Put the three together and the character of Provincia de Esmeraldas is legible: an Afro-Ecuadorian coast, a Colombian frontier, and a capital city that faces the water rather than the interior.

Few Ecuadorian provinces carry all three. The combination is what makes this province read differently from the coastal provinces further south.

What is the history of Provincia de Esmeraldas?

Provincia de Esmeraldas dates from 1847. Ecuador constituted the province in that year, and the borders it received, with Colombia to the north and Imbabura and Carchi to the east, have framed its history ever since. The Afro-Ecuadorian presence is older.

That identity is not administrative in origin, and it is the reason Esmeraldas is described as the seat of the culture rather than merely a place where it happens to be found.

What is the climate of Provincia de Esmeraldas?

The Pacific Ocean governs the air here. Provincia de Esmeraldas sits in the tropics on the northern side of the equator, and the ocean along its western edge keeps the coast humid and even rather than seasonal in the way an inland province would be. Warmth is a constant.

Anyone planning around weather should think about rain rather than temperature, whether the destination is Esmeraldas itself or the shore toward Colombia.

How do you get to Provincia de Esmeraldas?

Esmeraldas is the entry point. Roads from Imbabura and Carchi cross into the province from the east, and the capital is where they arrive, which makes it the place most journeys into Provincia de Esmeraldas actually begin. The southern approach is longer.

Traffic from Manabí, Pichincha and Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas comes up along the coast, and anything heading for the Colombian frontier continues north from the city rather than turning off before it.