From the rooftop terrace of the swanky hotel, I can see Quito sprawling out in every direction. Directly ahead is the dazzling white San Francisco monastery, with its ornate towers watching over an enormous plaza full of life. Old colonial buildings line the other sides of the square, while another church tower pierces the low clouds behind. Gaze to the right, and it looks like someone casually plonked Notre Dame Cathedral into the mix.
Terracotta rooftops creep up the foothills of the Andes in the middle distance, while volcanoes form the final backdrop. It’s a scene straight out of a 18th century painting, except everyone today is wearing modern clothes and waving cellphones.
I didn’t know what to expect from Quito, the capital of Ecuador, but I hadn’t imagined such magnificence. Unesco thankfully knows far more than me and declared the whole centre a World Heritage Site in 1978, making it the best-preserved historic zone in Latin America.
The protection arrived just in time to stop developers modernising the place by flattening ancient glories and erecting bland replacements. Our guide Iván Pilatuña points out a couple of offending buildings from the early 1970s, and we tut at this blight on the beauty. Then he leads us into the monastery, a serene maze of 13 cloisters, three churches, and a garden cafe where we relax and listen to his stories.
It was my first day in Ecuador and I’d joined a tour-for-tips organised by Community Adventures. There were only a handful of us in the group, and Pilatuña reminisced about more profitable days with larger groups when Ecuador was an up-and-coming tourist spot. Not now, he said, with the country unfortunately positioned between Colombia and Peru, the world’s two major cocaine producers. Peaceful, low-crime Ecuador with its handy coastline has become an attractive export corridor, and drug-trafficking and gang violence have quickly and dramatically flourished. Ecuador shot to the top of Latin America’s murder rate in 2023, with politicians and prosecutors among the victims. Crime is a major issue in the current presidential elections, with a runoff vote scheduled for April between conservative incumbent Daniel Noboa and leftist Luisa González.
Crime and tension were entirely invisible during my holiday, except for a brief moment when Pilatuña led us up a breathtakingly steep road in this city 2,850m above sea level. Enjoy the view, he said, but don’t come back here at night because it’s a dodgy area.
His excellent tour lasted almost four hours, taking us into old workshops where priceless religious statues are repaired, and showing us how to navigate the incredibly cheap bus system. It ended with a chocolate tasting, with Ecuador renowned as one of the world’s finest chocolate producers.
My hotel was an hour away over the hills in Tumbaco Valley, but armed with my new bus insights and a fistful of cents — the currency is the US dollar — I got there on two buses for a bargain of 80c. Some buses sport a logo declaring “The most beautiful city in the world” and as the road snaked around picturesque mountains and valleys, I couldn’t argue.
Since the country was named after the equator it sits on, it’s a must to straddle that line and stand in both hemispheres simultaneously. Quito has two equator museums, but we headed to a third, the Quitsato Equator Monument 47km out of the city. Here a metal dividing line runs across a large plaza surrounding a 10m tall sundial, while maps and rotating models provide the scientific facts. I could have just snapped some photos and enjoyed the cactus gardens, but I felt frustratingly dense as the guide tried to make science and astronomy comprehensible. This is my planet, I thought, I ought to know exactly how it moves and why flat maps get the Earth so wrong. When he produced an information pack complete with a blow-up globe, I was enthralled, and invested $40 on a self-improvement plan.
If that was the cerebral part of the journey, a hummingbird garden was the place that touched our souls. Even on the first balcony our cameras were working overtime as a rainbow of colourful birds fed on plates of fruit. Then Fabian Pulloquinga, the guide for a two-week tour I’d booked, told us we hadn’t even reached the real treasure. We followed him down to a viewing platform surrounded by trees and overlooking a valley. Pulloquinga hid the official feeding devices, poured a little sugar water into a bottle top, and placed it on his upturned palm. A moment’s pause as we watched his steady hand. Then a tiny green bird flew onto his fingers and started feeding. That was it. We all grabbed a bottle cap, trickled some sugar water in, and retreated to different parts of the platform.
Soon I felt a breeze fan my face and heard a buzzing sound like a miniature helicopter. An iridescent green hummingbird alighted on my fingers and dipped its long bill into the cap. It was so pretty, so delicate, weighed almost nothing, and gripped my fingers with its tiny claws. In a blur and a breeze it was gone, but another came, then two buzzed around, fanning my face as they jostled for position. I grinned with delight and felt humbled to be this close to nature. I wasn’t the only one. All of us were spellbound, and one man who had been sick for a few days told us that the magical moments revived his ailing spirits.
The countryside beyond Quito offers several towns worth exploring. Otavalo has a lively market that fills the central square, selling everyday essentials plus alpaca jumpers, T-shirts stamped with “Latitude 0°0’0”, colourful woven blankets and Panama hats. Many women here still wear the traditional costume of a white embroidered blouse, two large pieces of material that serve as a full-length skirt held in place with another strip of material, and shawls fastened in different ways to show if they’re married or single.
This is volcano territory too, with 84 scattered across the country and some still active. The most impressive is Cotopaxi, a glacier-covered cone rising 5,897m from flat Andean grasslands. Clouds kept hiding the peak as we approached, but we had occasional glimpses of the tip as well as sightings of a fox, wild horses and birds of prey. Cotopaxi’s last eruption in 1877 buried some villages in mudslides triggered by melting ice, and it spat out more clouds of ash in 2015.
Volcanic hikes are a big attraction, and another excursion took us to Cuicocha lagoon, formed when glacial ice melted in an eruption. After walking around part of the crater, we took a boat ride on the turquoise lake. In the middle are two islands, which are actually the peaks of volcanic blowholes. Air bubbles rising through the water show that the ancient rumbling and grumbling continues far below.
Lunch that afternoon was in a garden where the owner grows fruit and vegetables and prepares medicinal cures. The food was delicious, with locro de papa (potato and cheese soup), quinoa, beans, corn, rice, pork, chicken and finally, since we were special guests, a platter of cuy — fried guinea pig. Most of us dug in curiously, but I chose badly with a piece that was all bone and batter, so I couldn’t tell you if it tastes like chicken.
Meeting the locals is one of the joys of travelling, and the small town of Peguche is perfect for that. One interesting character is José Luis Pichamba, who makes and demonstrates traditional musical instruments in Ñanda Mañachi workshop. His family has represented Ecuador at international music festivals, with his son gaining a Japanese wife along the way. Nearby there’s a traditional weaving centre, and a bakery owned by a priest who sits with his employees to hand-make thousands of unsweetened bizchoco biscuits every day. There’s always something going on in these little side streets if you take the time to explore.
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