Ecuador

Ecuador is the smallest of the Andean countries and by a wide margin the most efficient. In 283,561 km² — about the size of the United Kingdom, or three and a half Czechias — it holds the Galápagos, a 6,263 m volcano, several thousand square kilometres of untouched Amazon, cloud forest with more bird species than all of Europe, and a Pacific coast. You can be in the rainforest on Monday, at 4,000 m on Wednesday and on a beach on Friday, and the internal flights are cheap.

It is also, at the time of writing, the Andean country whose situation has changed most. Ecuador spent decades as the region's safe, easy, backpacker-friendly option. Between 2021 and 2024 the homicide rate rose roughly sevenfold as transnational cocaine trafficking took hold in the port cities, and in January 2024 the government declared an "internal armed conflict" after gunmen took over a live television broadcast. That is not a reason to cancel a trip. It is a reason to plan one differently from how you would have planned it in 2018, and the safety section on this page treats it properly rather than burying it.

Practically: the currency is the US dollar, which removes an entire category of travel friction. Quito sits at 2,850 m, which introduces another. The Andean corridor, the cloud forest and the Galápagos are the trip most visitors should take, and the coast — with the exception of a few specific places — is the part to think hardest about.

Two weeks is the sensible minimum for mainland plus Galápagos; ten days does the mainland well on its own. Ecuador rewards moving slowly more than most countries, because the distances are short and the altitude is not.

Ecuador is the only country in the world named after a line of latitude. The name was adopted at independence in 1830 and comes directly from the French Geodesic Mission of 1735–1744, which came here to measure an arc of the meridian at the equator and settle whether the Earth bulges at the middle or at the poles. It does bulge at the middle, Newton was right, and the expedition left the region with a name.

Two parallel Andean ranges run the length of the country, with a high valley between them that Alexander von Humboldt named the Avenue of the Volcanoes. West of the Andes the land drops to the Pacific plain; east of them it falls into the Amazon basin. And 1,000 km out in the Pacific sit the Galápagos. No other country packs those four environments into so small a space.

Quito is in the northern highlands, Guayaquil on the southern coast, Cuenca in the southern Andes, and the Amazon begins about three hours east of Quito. The Galápagos are 1,000 km west and reached only by air.

Buses are the backbone of mainland travel: frequent, cheap — roughly US$1 to US$1.50 per hour of travel — and generally comfortable on the main routes. Internal flights are inexpensive and worth taking for the Quito–Cuenca and Quito–Coca legs.

Before the Inca there were the Quitu-Cara in the north, the Cañari around Cuenca and the Manteño on the coast, trading spondylus shell as far as Mexico. The Inca arrived late — the conquest of what is now Ecuador took most of the second half of the 15th century, and Cañari resistance was fierce enough that Huayna Cápac's campaigns are still remembered. Inca rule lasted barely fifty years before the Spanish.

Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, was born in Ecuador and ruled the northern half of the empire from Quito. His civil war against his half-brother Huáscar had just ended when Pizarro landed in 1532. Quito was burned by the Inca general Rumiñahui rather than surrendered, and refounded by the Spanish in 1534.

Colonial Quito became a wealthy centre of religious art — the Quito School, whose polychrome sculpture and gilded carving fill the churches of the old town and is the finest colonial art tradition in South America. Independence came with the Battle of Pichincha on the slopes above the city on 24 May 1822. Ecuador was part of Gran Colombia until 1830, when it left and took its name.

The twentieth century was dominated by the cacao and banana booms, a disastrous 1941 war with Peru that cost Ecuador a vast Amazonian territory, and after 1972 by oil — which built roads and hospitals and also opened the Amazon to colonisation and left Texaco's contamination in the northern Oriente, the subject of one of the longest environmental lawsuits in history.

Modern politics has been turbulent: three presidents removed between 1997 and 2005, ten years of Rafael Correa (2007–2017) and the 2008 constitution, then a sharp reversal, the 1999 banking collapse and dollarisation, mass Venezuelan immigration after 2017, and since 2021 the security crisis that now defines the country's politics.

Ecuador recognises 14 indigenous nationalities and 18 peoples, and unlike in many of its neighbours they are a decisive political force rather than a cultural footnote. CONAIE, the national indigenous confederation founded in 1986, has brought down governments — the uprisings of 1990, 2000, 2019 and 2022 each reshaped national politics, and the 2019 and 2022 strikes shut the country down for weeks.

Quito sits in a narrow valley at 2,850 m on the flank of the Pichincha volcano, which makes it the second-highest capital in the world after La Paz and the reason most visitors spend their first day moving slowly. Its Centro Histórico is the largest and best-preserved colonial centre in the Americas, and in 1978 it became — together with Kraków — one of the first two cultural sites ever inscribed on the World Heritage List.

Practical: stay in La Floresta or La Mariscal's quieter edges for restaurants and safety, or in a restored house in the Centro Histórico for atmosphere. Use registered taxis or apps rather than street cabs, and do not walk the old town after dark outside La Ronda.

About 25 km north of Quito stands the Ciudad Mitad del Mundo, a 30 m monument with a yellow line painted down the plaza and a globe on top, built in 1979 to mark where the French Geodesic Mission determined the equator to be. GPS puts the actual line about 240 m to the north. The monument has not moved.

Cuenca, 2,550 m in the southern Andes, is the country's third city and the one visitors most often say they could live in — which a substantial North American retirement community has taken literally. Its historic centre, inscribed by UNESCO in 1999, is a grid of cobbled streets, red-tiled roofs, four rivers and an unusual density of good coffee.

Guayaquil is Ecuador's largest city and its economic engine — the port through which the bananas, shrimp and cacao leave and, unfortunately, through which the cocaine leaves too. It is hot, flat, energetic and, since 2021, the epicentre of the country's security crisis. Most visitors pass through its airport rather than the city, and under current conditions that is a defensible choice.

The Otavalo market is the largest indigenous market in South America and it has been running, in some form, for at least six centuries — the Otavaleños were traders under the Inca and remain the most commercially successful indigenous group on the continent, with family businesses selling textiles from Bogotá to Barcelona.

Baños de Agua Santa sits at 1,800 m in the gorge where the Andes fall away into the Amazon basin, under the active Tungurahua volcano. It is Ecuador's adventure capital: thermal baths, canyoning, rafting, bridge jumps, and a road east that passes a waterfall every few kilometres.

Nineteen volcanic islands and over a hundred islets, 1,000 km out in the Pacific, sitting on a hotspot and in the collision of three ocean currents — which is why an equatorial archipelago has penguins and fur seals alongside flamingos and tropical fish. In 1978 the Galápagos became one of the first sites ever inscribed on the World Heritage List.

Charles Darwin spent five weeks here in 1835 aboard HMS Beagle, and did not have his idea on the islands — he had it years later in London, once John Gould pointed out that the finches he had collected sloppily were separate species. The islands did not produce evolution by natural selection in a flash of insight. They produced the evidence that made it inescapable.

The Galápagos is the most heavily regulated destination in the Americas and, since 1 August 2024, considerably more expensive: the national park entrance fee for foreign adults doubled from US$100 to US$200. Budget for it, and for everything else, before you decide.

Ecuador's Oriente is roughly half the country and holds under 5% of its people. Yasuní National Park, where the Andes, the equator and the Amazon meet, has recorded biodiversity levels that are among the highest ever measured anywhere: more tree species in one hectare than in all of the United States and Canada combined, and over 100,000 insect species per hectare by one estimate.

It also sits on top of oil. In 2007 Ecuador offered the world a deal — leave the ITT block under Yasuní undrilled in exchange for half its value in compensation. The world contributed a fraction of the target and the initiative was abandoned in 2013. Then, in August 2023, Ecuadorians voted in a national referendum to halt extraction in Block 43-ITT and wind the wells down. It is the first time a country has voted to leave proven oil reserves in the ground, and the implementation is contested and ongoing.

Humboldt named it in 1802 and the name stuck: a 300 km valley between the two Andean ranges with more than thirty volcanoes along it, eight of them over 5,000 m. Ecuador is the easiest country in the world in which to stand on a glacier on the equator, and the hardest in which to take that lightly.

Ecuador has recorded over 1,600 bird species — around a sixth of the world's total, in a country the size of the UK — including more than 130 species of hummingbird. The reason is the west slope of the Andes: a wall of cloud forest dropping from 4,000 m to sea level, packing a dozen life zones into fifty horizontal kilometres.

Quilotoa is a caldera 3 km across at 3,900 m, filled with a lake whose colour runs from jade to deep turquoise depending on the light and the minerals. It is a two-hour drive from Latacunga and the single most photographed thing in the Ecuadorian highlands.

Eighteen million people, of whom roughly 70% identify as mestizo, 7–8% as indigenous, 7% as Afro-Ecuadorian and the rest as white or other. The country also absorbed something like half a million Venezuelans after 2017 — a large share for a country this size, and visible in every city.

Highland Ecuadorian Spanish is the clearest in South America and a genuinely good place to learn: slow, fully pronounced, with none of the consonant-dropping of the Caribbean coast. Quito and Cuenca are full of language schools charging around US$8–12 an hour for one-to-one lessons, which is among the best value anywhere.

Ecuadorian cooking divides on the same axis as everything else: the highlands eat potatoes, pork, corn and soup; the coast eats fish, shrimp, plantain, peanut and coconut. The best food in the country is in the almuerzo — the two- or three-course set lunch that costs US$3 to US$5 and is what everybody actually eats.

The Panama hat is made in Ecuador, has always been made in Ecuador, and is called a Panama hat because that is where nineteenth-century buyers picked it up. Theodore Roosevelt wore one while visiting the canal works in 1906, the photograph went everywhere, and a national craft acquired another country's name permanently. UNESCO inscribed the weaving of the sombrero de paja toquilla on the Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2012.

On the equator, so there are no seasons in the temperate sense — altitude decides the temperature and the rain decides the calendar. Quito at 2,850 m sits at 10–20 °C every single month of the year. Guayaquil at sea level sits at 25–33 °C every month. What changes is how wet it is.

Two international airports: Quito (UIO), which is 45 minutes east of the city on a good toll road, and Guayaquil (GYE), which is fifteen minutes from its centre. Quito is the right arrival for the Andes, the Amazon and most Galápagos itineraries.

There is no direct flight from Central Europe, but Ecuador is well served from Madrid and Amsterdam, which makes it one of the easier South American countries to reach from Prague.

This section exists because most guidance about Ecuador was written before 2021 and is now wrong. Between 2021 and 2024 Ecuador's homicide rate rose from roughly 6 per 100,000 to over 45 — among the highest in Latin America — as Mexican and Balkan trafficking networks took over the cocaine route through its Pacific ports. In January 2024 the government declared an "internal armed conflict" against the gangs after armed men seized a live television studio in Guayaquil.

What this means for a visitor is narrower than the headlines suggest. The violence is overwhelmingly concentrated in specific places — the port cities and the northern border — and overwhelmingly between and within criminal organisations and the prison system. Tourists are not targets. But the environment has changed and the old "safest country in the Andes" advice should be discarded.

Mainland Ecuador is one of the best-value countries in South America; the Galápagos is one of the most expensive places in the hemisphere. Budget them separately or the average will mislead you badly. Figures are per person per day in US dollars — which is also the local currency, so what you read is what you pay.

Five inscriptions, and two of them were on the very first World Heritage List ever published in 1978 — the Galápagos and the city of Quito, alongside Kraków, Aachen and a handful of others.

Galápagos

1,000 km offshore, one of the first World Heritage sites ever inscribed, and now US$200 to enter.

Quito

The largest and best-preserved colonial centre in the Americas, at 2,850 m.

The Páramo

High grassland between 3,500 and 4,700 m — Ecuador's water tower and its wildest landscape.

The Oriente

Half the national territory, under 5% of the population, and the arena of Ecuador's central argument.

Quilotoa

A caldera 3 km across at 3,900 m, and the start of the country's best multi-day walk.

Marine Iguana

The only sea-going lizard on Earth, and found on no other archipelago.

Otavalo

The largest indigenous market in South America, trading in some form for six centuries.

Baños

Where the Andes fall into the Amazon, and Ecuador's adventure capital.

Hummingbirds

Over 130 species recorded — a good cloud-forest feeder shows fifteen in an afternoon.

Cloud Forest

The west slope of the Andes, two hours from Quito and among the birdiest places on Earth.

Canelazo

Hot aguardiente with cinnamon and naranjilla — the highland answer to 2,850 m after dark.

Flowers

Flower growing in the Andean highlands. Ecuador's export roses are raised under glass, where equatorial light and altitude give them their length.

Island Beaches

Reached on foot from Puerto Ayora, and shared with whatever is already lying on the sand.

The Pacific Coast

Surf, humpback whales from June to September, and the region needing the most careful planning.

Thermal Springs

Volcanic country means hot water, and the springs east of Quito are the best of them.

Avenue of the Volcanoes

Humboldt's name for the valley between the two Andean ranges, and it stuck.

Photographs are illustrative. Where an image could not be verified as a specific named place, the caption describes the subject in general terms rather than naming it.

Ecuador is the country I most often recommend to people who have never been to South America, and I have had to change how I recommend it. The case for going is unchanged and unusually strong: nowhere else lets you stand on a glacier at the equator on Tuesday and watch a sea lion ignore you on Friday, on a budget, in a country the size of the UK, using US dollars.

What has changed is that the improvised version of this trip — turn up, get on whatever bus, follow the coast, see where it goes — is no longer the good idea it was in 2015. Plan the route, stay in the Sierra and the islands, use apps rather than street taxis, read your foreign ministry's page the week you fly. That is not a heavy burden and it converts most of the risk back to normal.

The other thing worth saying: the Galápagos at US$200 entry plus flights plus a boat is now a serious financial decision, and it is fine to decide against it. Mindo and the Chocó will show you more species; Isla de la Plata will show you blue-footed boobies for a fortieth of the price; the Quilotoa Loop and a hacienda week will give you a better sense of the country than any cruise. Go to the islands if they are the reason you are coming. Do not go because you feel you have to.

— Radim Kaufmann