Tungurahua, Ecuador — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Tungurahua known for?

Tungurahua volcano stands within the province's boundaries, and the province took the mountain's name rather than a saint's or a founder's, which is unusual enough to be worth knowing before arrival. Provincial business runs through Ambato. Travellers come for the mountain country the volcano implies and for the working city that organises it, not for one street or square that stands above the rest.

Where is Tungurahua?

The province owns its mountain. Tungurahua volcano stands within the provincial boundaries rather than on the edge of them, which is why the name of the mountain and the name of the province are the same word. Ambato lies in the same territory.

A province of a few thousand square kilometres that contains both a named volcano and its capital is compact country by any standard. Ecuador divides itself into twenty-four provinces. Tungurahua is one of them, and its share of the national map is small in area but distinct in character, because a volcano inside the boundary does more to mark a province out than a length of coastline or a stretch of plain.

The province lies south of the equator. The tropical band covers it, though the ground around the volcano answers to height rather than to the band, and that difference is the one a visitor actually feels. Distance is measured from Ambato.

The capital is the point everything else in Provincia de Tungurahua is reckoned against, and the volcano is the fixed landmark that tells a traveller which way the ground rises from there. The shape is simple. One city, one mountain and the country between them account for most of what a visitor will see, and a province this size can be understood in a couple of days rather than a couple of weeks.

What is Tungurahua like?

A mountain does the identifying here. The province and the mountain answer to the same word, and that word does the work that a cathedral, a river or a founding family does elsewhere. One language covers it.

Ambato conducts its administration and its trade in Spanish, and so does every smaller place in the province. Ambato does the concentrating. As the capital of Provincia de Tungurahua it carries the institutions, the trade and the schooling that a province this size can support, and what is decided there reaches the rest of the territory quickly.

The province is compact enough to share one centre. That matters for culture, because a territory small enough for everyone to reach the same city in a day develops fewer separate habits than a sprawling one does. Height shapes daily life more than the calendar does.

A province that contains Tungurahua volcano arranges its ordinary business around slopes and roads that climb, rather than around a coast or a plain. The founding date is 1860. Ecuador's provincial system has carried Tungurahua under that name since then, long enough for the name to be as much a local identity as an administrative label.

What is the history of Tungurahua?

Ecuador fixed the province in 1860. The territory around Ambato was constituted as Provincia de Tungurahua in that year, taking the volcano's name into the administrative record for good. The mountain predates all of it.

Nothing in the name has changed since, and the volcano that supplied it stands where it did when the boundary was drawn.

What is the climate of Tungurahua?

The volcano rules the thermometer. Ground that climbs towards Tungurahua volcano turns the province's tropical position into something much cooler than the same band delivers at low ground, and the difference between one part of Tungurahua and another is vertical rather than seasonal. Rain has its months.

Ambato sees the year split between wetter and drier months, and the calendar matters less than the height at which a traveller happens to be standing.

How do you get to Tungurahua?

Ambato is the hinge. Most journeys here begin or break at the capital, because that is where the province's roads converge, and a traveller heading for the volcano or the country below it will change vehicles or direction there. The province is short across.

Nothing inside Provincia de Tungurahua is more than a few hours from Ambato by road, which makes a single base workable in a way it is not in the wider provinces of Ecuador.