The Rough Guide to Ecuador (Rough Guides)

591 Pages·2010·16.15 MB·English

by  Harry Ades, Melissa Graham

THE ROUGH GUIDE to
Ecuador
ROUGHGUIDES
ECUADOR
San 0 50 km
Esmeraldas Lorenzo COLOMBIA
8
Tulcán
6 2
PACIFIC
OCEAN
Otavalo Ibarra Lago Agrio
Equator 0˚
Bahía de dSea lnotso C Doolomriandgoos QUITO 1
Caráquez Coca
Manta
Quevedo Latacunga Tena 5
Portoviejo Ambato
Baños
3 Puyo
Puerto
López 7 Babahoyo Riobamba
Guayaquil
Salinas
Macas
Golfo de Cuenca
Guayaquil
Machala
1 Quito and around
4 2 The northern sierra
3 The central sierra
4 The southern sierra
Loja 5 The Oriente
6 The northern lowlands
Vilcabamba PERU and coast
7 Guayaquil and
0 50 km the southern coast
8 The Galápagos Islands
About this book
Rough Guides are designed to be good to read and easy to use. The book is
divided into the following sections and you should be able to find whatever you
need in one of them.
The colour section is designed to give you a feel for Ecuador, suggesting when
to go and what not to miss, and includes a full list of contents. Then comes
basics, for pre-departure information and other practicalities.
The guide chapters cover Ecuador’s regions in depth, each starting with a
highlights panel, introduction and a map to help you plan your route.
The contexts section fills you in on Ecuador’s history, art, music, film,
literature and wildlife, while individual colour inserts introduce Galápagos
wildlife – with a field guide to help identify various birds, mammals and reptiles
– and Ecuadorian crafts and markets. Language gives you an extensive menu
reader and enough Spanish and Kichwa to get by.
The book concludes with all the small print, including details of how to send in
updates and corrections, and a comprehensive index.
This fourth edition published January 2010.
The publishers and authors have done their best to ensure the accuracy and currency of all the
information in The Rough Guide to Ecuador, however, they can accept no responsibility for any loss,
injury, or inconvenience sustained by any traveller as a result of information or advice contained in
the guide.
The Rough Guide to
Ecuador
written and researched by
Harry Adès and Melissa Graham
with additional contributions from
Carlos Villafuerte, Matthew L. Goldman, Louise Williamson
and Sarah Lazarus
www.roughguides.com
Contents

Colour section 1 Contexts 485
Introduction ............................... 6 History ................................... 487
Where to go ............................... 9 Art, literature, music and film...503
When to go .............................. 13 Mainland geography and
Things not to miss ................... 15 wildlife ................................... 509
Galápagos wildlife ................. 522
Basics 25 Books .................................... 533

Geting there . 27 Language 541
Health ...................................... 30
Getting around ......................... 35 Pronunciation ......................... 543
Accommodation....................... 39 Words and phrases ................ 544
Food and drink ........................ 41 Food and drink terms ............. 546
The media ................................ 44 Kichwa (Quichua) ................... 549
Festivals................................... 45 Glossary................................. 551
Sports and outdoor activities ... 47
National parks and protected Travel store 553
areas ........................................ 52
Culture and etiquette .............. 54
Living in Ecuador ..................... 55 Small print & Index 561
Travel essentials ...................... 58

Guide 67 Crafts and markets
colour section
1 Quito and around ................ 69 following p.184
2 The northern sierra ............ 127
3 The central sierra .............. 171
4 The southern sierra ........... 229 Galápagos field
5 The Oriente ....................... 271 guide colour section
6 The northern lowlands and following p.472
coast ................................. 333
7 Guayaquil and the southern
coast ................................. 389
8 The Galápagos Islands...... 435
3
왗왗 Cotopaxi summit 왗 Marching band in front of Catedral Nueva, Cuenca
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4
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Galápagos Islands (960km)
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Z
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Guamote
Salinas Guayaquil
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Macas
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Introduction to
Ecuador
“Ecuador, so tiny on the map of the world, has always possessed the grandeur of a
great country to those who know her well.”
Albert B. Franklin, Ecuador: Portrait of a People
Sitting on the equator between Colombia and Peru, Ecuador
may be the smallest Andean nation but it’s packed with the
most startling contrasts of scenery. With its astounding
biodiversity, impressive historical legacy, stunning colonial
architecture, bustling highland markets and diverse mix of
people – blacks, whites, indigenous and mestizo – it’s easy
to see why this friendly and exotic destination is regarded
as a microcosm of South America. From the icy pinnacles
of Chimborazo, to the tropical forests of vast reserves like
Parque Nacional Yasuní, to the palm-fringed beaches of the
Pacific coast, Ecuador hums with life – all within easy reach
of Quito, its jewel of a capital.
The steamy jungle wilderness of the Oriente
and the mist-shrouded lowland cloudforests
hold and protect just some of the country’s
mind-boggling array of fora and fauna: there
are more bird species per square mile in
Ecuador than any other South American
country and more orchids than anywhere
else on the planet. The country’s greatest draw, though, are the captivating
Galápagos Islands, nearly 1,0000km from the mainland, whose extraordi-
nary wildlife inspired Charles Darwin and changed the world.
6 Ecuador’s mainland divides neatly into three distinct regions running
the length of the country in parallel strips. In the middle is the sierra,
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formed by the eastern and western
chains of the Andes, which are punctu- Fact file
ated by more than thirty volcanoes and s Ecuador is around 285,000
enclosed by a series of high plateaux square kilometres in area
at around 2800m above sea level, - roughly equivalent to the
themselves divided by gentle nudos, or US state of Nevada, or the
United Kingdom combined
“knots” of hills. This is the agricultural
with Belgium.
and indigenous heartland of Ecuador,
s Spanish is the official
a region of patchwork felds, stately
language of Ecuador, but
haciendas and remote farming villages, there are more than twenty
as well as the country’s oldest and most other native tongues,
important cities, including Quito. East including several dialects of
of the sierra is the Oriente, a large, Kichwa, the language of the
Inca Empire.
sparsely populated area extending into
s The majority of Ecuador’s
the upper Amazon basin, much of it
14.5 million people are
covered by dense tropical rainforest – mestizos (mixed spanish and
an exhilarating, exotic region, though indigenous blood), a quarter
under increasing threat from the oil are indigenous people from
industry and colonization. West of the more than a dozen native
groups, seven percent are
sierra, in the coastal region, banana,
white, mainly of Spanish
sugar, cofee, rice and cacao crops line a extraction, and three percent
fertile alluvial plain that is bordered on are black.
s The Spanish first estab-
lished the boundaries of what
roughly now corresponds to
Ecuador in 1563. It became
an independent republic in
1830, when it was officially
named after the equator,
which passes through it.
Voting is compulsory for any
literate person aged between
18 and 65, and optional for
other eligible citizens.
s Ecuador’s main exports are
petroleum products, bananas,
coffee, cacao, cut flowers and
shrimp. Despite its large oil
reserves and rich farmland,
the economy is often severely
affected by fluctuations in
world commodity prices and
around 38 percent of
its people live below the 7
poverty line.
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왖 Saquisilí local
Volcanoes
Ecuador is one of the most
volcanically active areas on the
South American continent, and the
highlands are studded with snow-
crested cones looming into the sky
either side of a broad central valley,
which the explorer Alexander von
Humboldt grandly called the “avenue
of the volcanoes”. Though many of
the country’s 55 volcanic peaks are
extinct, eight remain active, while
another nine have erupted in the last
few thousand years and are classified
as “potentially active”. Anyone who
stays for a few months is likely to
feel a small tremor or see puffs of
volcanic ash curling into the air from
a summit on the horizon. Every now and then volcanoes near population
centres, such as Guagua Pichincha above Quito or Tungurahua by
Baños, rumble into life triggering civil safety precautions. Nevertheless,
Ecuador’s volcanoes – which include the furthest point from the centre of
the Earth (Chimborazo), the highest point on the equator (Cayambe), and
one of the highest active peaks in the world (Cotopaxi) – are spectacular
fixtures, attracting mountaineers from across the globe and awe in all
who see them.
its Pacifc seaboard by a string of beaches, mangrove swamps, shrimp farms
and ports. Almost a thousand kilometres of ocean separate the coastline
from the Galápagos archipelago, famed for its wondrous endemic birds,
mammals, reptiles and plants.
Ecuador’s regions provide a home to almost ffteen million people, the
majority of whom live on the coast and in the sierra. For the most part,
they are descendants of the various indigenous groups who frst inhab-
ited Ecuador’s territory twelve thousand years ago, Incas who colonized
the land in the late ffteenth century, Spaniards who conquered the Incas
in the 1530s and African slaves brought by Spanish colonists. Although
the mixing of blood over the centuries has resulted in a largely mestizo
(mixed) population, the indigenous element remains very strong, particu-
larly among the Kichwa-speaking communities of the rural sierra and the
various ethnic groups of the Oriente such as the Shuar, Achuar, Huaorani
and Secoya, while on the north coast there’s a signifcant black popula-
8 tion. As in many parts of Latin America, social and economic divisions
between indígenas, blacks, mestizos and an elite class of whites remain
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