Ecuador in 13 Pics

Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL

Capital: Quito

Population: 17 million+

Language: Spanish (also Kichwa and Shuar)

1 – Galápagos Islands (also above)

The Galápagos Islands, a volcanic archipelago some 1,000 km off Ecuador’s coast, were found in 1535 by Tomás de Berlanga, Bishop of Panama, when currents carried his ship off course, and their first known resident was an Irish sailor, Patrick Watkins, marooned on Floreana in the early 1800s.

Most visitors to the Galápagos land on Baltra, whose airstrip was built as a US base in WWII to guard the Panama Canal, before setting out for Santa Cruz and the Charles Darwin Research Station, Isabela and its penguins, the only penguins found north of the equator, and Española’s waved albatrosses.

On Floreana in the Galápagos stands a barrel that has served as a post office since 1793, when the British captain James Colnett set it up for whalers, and visitors keep the honour system going, leaving postcards for others to carry home and hand-deliver.

2 – Vilcabamba

Vilcabamba is a small town in a warm, sheltered valley in Loja province in Ecuador’s far south, at around 1,500 m, overlooked by the Mandango ridge, known as the “Sleeping Inca”.

Vilcabamba is a base for walking and horse riding, with a steep trail across the face of Mandango, waterfalls in the side valleys and the cloud forest of Podocarpus National Park just to the east.

In the 1970s, Vilcabamba became world-famous as the “Valley of Longevity”, with residents claiming to be well over 100, until a 1978 study found no living centenarians at all, the oldest resident being 96.

3 – El Panecillo, Quito

El Panecillo, the loaf-shaped hill in the middle of Quito, known to the Quitu people as Yavirac, rises above the colonial heart of the city, which in 1978 became one of the first cultural sites on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

On top of El Panecillo stands the Virgen de Quito, about 41 m high including its base, assembled in 1975 from 7,400 numbered aluminium pieces made in Madrid, with steps inside the base leading to viewing platforms over the old town and its ring of volcanoes.

The Virgen de El Panecillo is a giant copy of Bernardo de Legarda’s small wooden Virgin of Quito of 1734, caught mid-dance as she crushes a serpent, and with her wings she is the tallest winged statue of the Virgin Mary in the world.

4 – Pichincha Volcano

Pichincha is an active volcano rising just west of Quito, and on its slopes on 24 May 1822, Sucre’s army, joined by the British Legion’s Albión Battalion and the Cork-born Daniel Florence O’Leary, defeated the royalists and won Ecuador’s independence.

Pichincha has two summits, Rucu Pichincha, 4,698 m, reached by riding the TelefériQo cable car from Quito to close to 4,000 m and walking up, and Guagua Pichincha, about 4,780 m, approached from the village of Lloa.

Pichincha is no museum piece, for Guagua Pichincha, only about 10 km from Quito, erupted in 1999 and dusted the capital with ash.

5 – Basílica del Voto Nacional, Quito

The Basílica del Voto Nacional is a vast neo-Gothic church in Quito’s historic centre, decreed in 1883 and begun in 1892, inspired by France’s Bourges Cathedral and often described as the largest neo-Gothic church in South America.

Visitors to the Basílica del Voto Nacional climb steep steps and ladders to its towers for views over the city, while its gargoyles swap Europe’s demons for Ecuadorian wildlife, such as iguanas, Galápagos tortoises, armadillos and condors.

Local legend says that when the Basílica del Voto Nacional is finished the world will end, and although Pope John Paul II blessed it in 1985 and it was consecrated in 1988, it has never been quite completed.

6 – Cotopaxi National Park

Cotopaxi National Park, about 50 km south of Quito, surrounds Cotopaxi, at 5,897 m one of the world’s highest active volcanoes, whose eruptions in 1744 and 1768 destroyed the town of Latacunga, which mudflows levelled again in 1877.

In Cotopaxi National Park, the classic day is a drive across the páramo grassland past Limpiopungo lagoon, then a short, breathless walk up to the José Ribas refuge, at 4,864 m, and on to the edge of the glacier.

Alexander von Humboldt tried to climb Cotopaxi in 1802, reached about 4,500 m and judged the summit out of reach, and it was first climbed on 28 November 1872 by the German geologist Wilhelm Reiss and the Colombian Ángel Escobar.

7 – Quilotoa Crater

Quilotoa is a caldera about 3 km wide in the western Andes of Ecuador, formed when the volcano collapsed after a huge eruption around 1280, whose flows and mudslides reached the Pacific.

From the rim of Quilotoa, at about 3,900m, a steep path leads down to the lake shore, with a much harder climb back up, and the multi-day Quilotoa Loop winds through the Kichwa villages around it.

The striking green of the lake at Quilotoa comes from dissolved volcanic minerals, and the water, some 250m deep, is acidic enough that swimming is banned.

8 – Cuenca

Cuenca, at about 2,550 m on four rivers in Ecuador’s southern Andes, was founded in 1557 on the ruins of the Inca city of Tomebamba, itself built over the Cañari town of Guapondelig, and its historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Cuenca’s old town of cobbles and balconies is crowned by the blue domes of the New Cathedral, whose towers were left short because the foundations could not carry them, with the Inca ruins of Pumapungo nearby and El Cajas National Park just west of the city.

The Panama hat is not Panamanian at all, but woven from toquilla straw in Ecuador, around Cuenca and Montecristi, and named after Panama, the hub through which the hats were sold, and Theodore Roosevelt wore one on his visit to the canal in 1906.

9 – Mitad del Mundo Monument

The Mitad del Mundo Monument stands about 26 km north of Quito, marking the equator measured by the French Geodesic Mission of the 1730s and 1740s, which showed that the Earth bulges at the equator and is flattened at the poles, as Newton had predicted.

The centrepiece of Mitad del Mundo is a 30 m monument built in 1979–82 and topped by a globe, with an ethnographic museum inside and a yellow line across the plaza for the classic photograph with a foot in each hemisphere.

Modern GPS puts the true equator about 240 m north of the painted line at Mitad del Mundo, so generations of visitors have straddled the “middle of the world” with both feet in the Southern Hemisphere.

10 – Ingapirca

Ingapirca, Kichwa for “Inca wall”, is the largest known Inca site in Ecuador, at about 3,200 m in Cañar province north of Cuenca, built on a Cañari sacred site after the Incas conquered the Cañari in the late 15th century.

The history of Ingapirca can be read in its stones, with rough Cañari walls set in mortar beside the precise, mortarless green andesite of Inca masonry, alongside storehouses, terraces and what was probably a house of chosen women.

The centrepiece of Ingapirca is the Temple of the Sun, an unusual elliptical building curved around a Cañari ceremonial rock, in an empire that otherwise built almost entirely in straight lines.

11 – Guayaquil

Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city and main port, was founded in the late 1530s by Francisco de Orellana on the Guayas estuary, and the Drogheda-born Thomas Charles Wright, regarded as a founding father of Ecuador’s navy, commanded its first squadron from 1823.

In Guayaquil on 26–27 July 1822, Bolívar and San Martín, the two liberators of South America, met behind closed doors, and historians have long debated what passed between them, but San Martín soon withdrew from Peru and later went into exile in France.

Guayaquil is best seen from the Malecón 2000 promenade along the river and from the 444 steps that climb past the painted houses of Las Peñas to the lighthouse on Cerro Santa Ana.

12 – Otavalo

Otavalo is a Kichwa town ringed by volcanoes in Ecuador’s northern highlands, whose people were weaving and trading long before the Incas arrived around 1495, and who were later forced to work in Spanish obrajes, colonial textile workshops.

Saturday is market day in Otavalo, when the Plaza de los Ponchos spills into the surrounding streets with weavings, alpaca knits, hats and instruments, an animal market runs from first light and the Peguche waterfall lies just outside town.

The Otavaleños made the craft forced on them their own, selling textiles and playing Andean music around the world, and they are widely described as one of the most prosperous indigenous groups in South America.

13 – Yasuní National Park

Yasuní National Park covers about 982,000 ha of Amazon rainforest in north-eastern Ecuador, protected since 1979, and is home to the Waorani as well as the Tagaeri and Taromenane peoples, who live in voluntary isolation.

Yasuní National Park is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, where a single hectare can hold about 655 tree species, more than are native to the US and Canada combined, alongside nearly 600 bird species and about 150 amphibians.

In August 2023 Ecuadorians voted in a national referendum, by about 59%, to keep the oil beneath part of Yasuní National Park in the ground, a first-of-its-kind vote to halt drilling already under way.