Ecuador Travel Guide

Ecuador is one of the most extraordinary travel destinations on Earth, a nation that packs more diversity, beauty, and biological wonder into its relatively compact borders than most countries ten times its size. Smaller than the state of Nevada, Ecuador nevertheless contains four utterly distinct worlds: a warm Pacific coastline with surf beaches and mangrove forests, a dramatic spine of volcanic Andes mountains crowned with glaciers, a vast and primordial Amazon rainforest teeming with life, and the Galápagos Islands, the most famous and scientifically significant archipelago on the planet. To travel through Ecuador is to move between worlds, each one offering experiences unlike anything available elsewhere on Earth.

The numbers alone are staggering. Ecuador is widely considered the most biodiverse country on Earth per square kilometer, a distinction earned through the extraordinary convergence of ecosystems that occurs within its borders. Roughly eight percent of all plant species known to science are found here. More than 1,600 bird species inhabit the country, the highest density of bird species per unit area of any nation on Earth. Over 350 reptile species, more than 400 amphibian species, and thousands of insect species make their homes in Ecuador's varied habitats. The country hosts a greater diversity of hummingbirds than any other nation on Earth, and the orchid collections found in its cloud forests are among the richest anywhere. What makes this biological wealth possible is the meeting of extremes: the cold Humboldt Current from Antarctica, equatorial Amazon lowlands, sharply rising Andes, and the remote volcanic Galápagos.

The Galápagos Islands, located about 1,000 kilometers off Ecuador's Pacific coast, represent perhaps the most important living laboratory of evolution on Earth. When Charles Darwin visited the archipelago in 1835 aboard HMS Beagle, the unique and fearless wildlife he observed helped crystallize his thinking about natural selection and ultimately led to the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. The Galápagos remain today what they were in Darwin's time: a place where evolution proceeds in slow motion before the visitor's eyes, where animals evolved without significant predators exhibit a total lack of fear toward humans, and where the diversity of life forms that have adapted to different island conditions is visible and comprehensible in a way that makes abstract evolutionary theory suddenly, powerfully concrete. Blue-footed boobies dance on black lava for disinterested mates. Marine iguanas sneeze crystallized salt beside crashing Pacific surf. Giant tortoises weighing 250 kilograms lumber through highland fog as they have for millions of years. It is a world outside of time.

Within the Andes, Ecuador offers volcanic landscapes of such drama and grandeur that the great German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who explored the region in 1802, named the corridor running south from Quito the Avenue of the Volcanoes. Cotopaxi, at 5,897 meters, is one of the world's highest active volcanoes and arguably the most perfectly symmetrical conical volcano anywhere on Earth, its white glacier shining against blue Andean skies. Chimborazo, at 6,268 meters, is not the highest mountain in the world measured from sea level, but its location near the equatorial bulge means that its summit is the point on Earth's surface farthest from the planet's center, farther even than the summit of Mount Everest. Ecuador's claim to geographical superlatives is unmatched by any country of comparable size on Earth.

The capital city of Quito, perched at 2,850 meters in a long narrow valley between Andean ridges, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978, among the first cities in the world to receive that honor, recognized as possessing the best-preserved colonial city center in all of the Americas. The historic centre of Quito is not merely a collection of old buildings but a living, breathing colonial cityscape where convents, plazas, palaces, and churches adorned with gold leaf and painted in brilliant colors create an atmosphere of extraordinary historical depth. The Compañía de Jesús church in Quito is considered one of the finest examples of Baroque architecture in the Western Hemisphere, its interior encrusted with an estimated seven tons of gold leaf and its façade among the most ornate in the Americas.

Ecuador's cultural life is equally rich. The Saturday market at Otavalo, in the highlands north of Quito, has operated since before the Spanish conquest and is today the most famous indigenous market in South America, a riot of color and commerce where the Otavaleño people sell textiles, ponchos, blankets, and jewelry that blend pre-Columbian traditions with centuries of craft development. The Otavaleño are renowned as among the most commercially successful indigenous people in the Americas, having built textile trading networks that extend around the world while maintaining their traditional dress, language, and cultural identity with remarkable tenacity.

Ecuador produces what many connoisseurs consider the world's finest chocolate. The native cacao variety known as Arriba Nacional, grown in Ecuador's lowland and foothill regions, produces beans with a complex, floral aroma and flavor profile that is prized by premium chocolate makers around the world. The cultivation and craftsmanship of Ecuadorian chocolate has been recognized as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, a designation that reflects the deep cultural roots of cacao in Ecuadorian life. Visitors can tour cacao plantations, meet the farmers who tend the ancient trees, and taste chocolate produced with minimal processing from some of the world's most celebrated beans.