Provincia de Loja, Ecuador — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Provincia de Loja known for?

The Quichua word Cuxibamba attaches to the ground Loja occupies, and the translation usually given for it, the Smiley Valley, has followed the province into everything written about it since. Neighbours frame the rest. El Oro Province lies to the west, El Azuay to the north and Zamora-Chinchipe to the east, which gives Provincia de Loja three provincial neighbours and no shoreline of its own.

Where is Provincia de Loja?

Loja is boxed in by neighbours. El Oro Province lies to the west, El Azuay to the north and Zamora-Chinchipe to the east, so Provincia de Loja is enclosed by neighbours on the sides that matter and reaches no coastline at all. The valley is the anchor.

Cuxibamba, the Quichua name rendered as the Smiley Valley, describes the ground Loja stands on, and the settlement was moved there and rebuilt after earthquakes made its earlier site at La Toma untenable. Earthquakes shaped the map here. Provincia de Loja lies in the tropics on the southern side of the equator, and it counts as one of the twenty-four provinces Ecuador is divided into.

Its ground is not flat. A province that had to relocate a town because of seismic damage sits on unsettled country, and the terrain between Loja and the Zamora-Chinchipe boundary rises and falls enough to make road distances misleading. Loja itself is the fixed point.

Everything inside the province is described in relation to that city, whether the direction of travel is toward El Oro Province, up toward El Azuay, or east into Zamora-Chinchipe.

What is Provincia de Loja like?

Two languages left their names here. Spanish arrived with the founding of Loja on its present site in 1548 by Captain Alonso de Mercadillo, while the Quichua word Cuxibamba was already attached to the valley the town was rebuilt in. Both names survive.

Spanish is the working language of Provincia de Loja, and the Quichua layer is carried by the valley's own name, with the Smiley Valley translation repeated wherever the province is described. Mercadillo's name is attached to the founding. A Spanish captain moving a settlement out of La Toma after earthquakes and re-establishing it in the Cuxibamba Valley is the origin story the province tells about itself, and the detail that carries is the earthquake, not the ceremony.

La Toma lost the town. That earlier site is remembered mainly as the place Loja was moved away from, which is an unusual kind of legacy for a settlement to carry inside its own province. Ecuador made Loja a province in 1824.

The provincial frame came later than the town, and what a visitor encounters is therefore a place whose civic identity is older than its administrative one by nearly three centuries.

What is the history of Provincia de Loja?

Loja was moved to stay standing. Earthquakes made the site at La Toma untenable, and the settlement was rebuilt on its present ground in 1548 under Captain Alonso de Mercadillo, which is the founding date the province still uses. The province came much later.

Ecuador constituted Provincia de Loja in 1824, adding an administrative layer over a town that had already survived one relocation and nearly three centuries in the Cuxibamba Valley.

What is the climate of Provincia de Loja?

The Cuxibamba Valley moderates things. Provincia de Loja sits in the tropics on the southern side of the equator, and the valley floor that Loja occupies keeps the town's conditions steadier than the ground that rises away from it. The valley earned its name.

Cuxibamba renders as the Smiley Valley, and the name has stuck to the ground the town was rebuilt on.

How do you get to Provincia de Loja?

Everything converges on one valley. Roads into Provincia de Loja come from El Oro Province on the west, from El Azuay on the north and from Zamora-Chinchipe on the east, and all of them end up at the city in the Cuxibamba Valley. There is no sea route.

A province with no coastline is reached overland or not at all, and the terrain that once forced a town to move is the same terrain a traveller crosses to get here.