Ecuador
A small land of four worlds on the equator, coast and Andes and Amazon and the Galapagos, heir to the Inca and to old Quito, and built on the bond between its peoples, their earth, and one another. The complete guide, the forces first.
Ecuador is a small country on the western edge of South America, named for the equator that crosses it, and famous for holding several worlds in a tiny space. In a land smaller than many a single province of its neighbours lie four sharply different regions: the hot Pacific coast, the high Andean mountains down the middle, the Amazon rainforest in the east, and the Galapagos Islands far out in the ocean. Ecuadorian life rests on a few deep forces. The first is this very diversity, the four worlds in one land and the long divide between the highlands and the coast. The second is the indigenous highland world of the Kichwa peoples, heirs of the Inca, with the great weaving town of Otavalo at its heart. The third is the bond with the earth and the volcanoes, the reverence for Mother Earth and the idea of living in balance with nature, held so deeply that the country wrote the rights of nature into its constitution. The fourth is the Spanish colonial and Catholic heart, centred on old Quito, and the mixing of peoples it brought. From these flow two great cuisines, a calendar of fused festivals, the bright art of Andean weaving and dress, and a warm, family-centred way of life.
Four worlds in one small land
The first thing to know about Ecuador is that it is small and astonishingly varied, a little country that holds within it several worlds. Its name comes from the equator, which runs right across it near the capital, and Ecuadorians speak of standing at the middle of the world. In a space smaller than many a single neighbour's province lie four sharply different regions. Along the Pacific runs the hot, green coast, the land of plantain and seafood and the great port city of Guayaquil. Down the centre rise the Andes in a double wall of snow peaks and high valleys, a stretch so crowded with volcanoes that it has been called the avenue of the volcanoes, holding the capital, Quito, and the indigenous highland towns. East of the mountains the land falls into the Amazon rainforest, green and vast and thinly peopled. And far out in the ocean lie the Galapagos Islands, a world of their own.
This crowding of worlds into one small country is the great fact of Ecuadorian life. A few hours' road can carry a traveller from tropical beach to freezing mountain pass to steaming jungle. Each region grows different food, keeps a different pace, and breeds a different kind of person.
Above all there is the divide between the highlands and the coast. The people of the cool highlands, with Quito at their centre, are seen as more reserved, more formal, and more indigenous in their roots; the people of the warm coast, with Guayaquil at theirs, as quicker, louder, more open, and more mixed. The two great cities are old rivals, and a gentle teasing runs between mountain folk and coast folk. To understand Ecuador is to begin with its four worlds and the line between mountain and sea.
The indigenous highlands and the Kichwa
Beneath the Spanish surface of Ecuador lies a deep indigenous root, strongest in the highlands. The native highland people are the Kichwa, who speak the northern form of the old Inca tongue and are the heirs of the Inca and of the peoples the Inca conquered. They live in communities up and down the mountain valleys, farming the high fields of potato and maize as their ancestors did, and though they are a smaller share of the nation than the indigenous peoples of Peru or Bolivia, their presence and their voice are strong.
The most famous of them are the people of Otavalo, a highland town north of Quito whose weavers and traders are known across the world. Their great market, spread across the town, sells the woven cloth, ponchos, and blankets for which they are celebrated, and the Otavalo people have carried their textiles and their music to every continent while keeping their dress, their language, and their ways. In the eastern rainforest live other peoples entirely, the Shuar, the Waorani, and many small nations, each with its own tongue and its own world.
Ecuador's indigenous people have become a force in the life of the whole nation. Through their own great organizations they have shaped the country's politics, defended their lands and the forest, and pressed their vision into the nation's laws. Through it all runs the old highland habit of working together, the minga, in which a whole community turns out to share a task for the common good, a custom alive since long before the Inca. The indigenous highlands are among the deepest sources of what Ecuador is.
Mother Earth, the volcanoes, and good living
From the indigenous root grows a way of seeing the earth as living and holy, shared with the rest of the Andes but carried in Ecuador to a striking place. At its heart is Mother Earth, whom the Andean people call Pachamama, the living earth who gives food and life and must be honoured and thanked. The great snow volcanoes that line the highlands are felt as mighty beings in their own right, watched, named, and respected, and the planting and the harvest are marked with old rites of thanks to the earth.
From this comes an idea that Ecuador has made famous, the idea of living well in balance with nature and community rather than in the endless chase for more. The Kichwa call it the good life, or sumak kawsay, and it holds that a person is part of the living earth and flourishes only in harmony with it. So deeply is this felt that Ecuador became one of the first countries on earth to write the rights of nature into its very constitution, declaring that the natural world itself has a right to exist and flourish.
Over this older sense of the sacred lies the Catholic faith, brought by Spain and embraced by the great majority, and the two have grown together. Most Ecuadorians are Catholic, keeping the saints, the Virgin, and the holy days with deep devotion, yet in the highlands the old reverence for the earth and the mountains runs on beneath, and the two meet in a single blended faith and in festivals that honour a Christian saint and the turning earth at once.
The colonial heart and the mixed nation
Ecuador is also the child of Spain, and the meeting of peoples it brought is a force of its own. The Spanish came in the early sixteenth century, soon after the Inca had drawn the region into their empire from the north, and for three centuries they ruled it from Quito, a colonial city set high in the mountains. Quito grew into one of the jewels of Spanish America, and its old heart survives today as one of the finest colonial centres in the Americas, a dense maze of squares and monasteries and churches whose interiors blaze with carved and gilded wood, the work of a celebrated school of indigenous and mestizo artists who made the city a great seat of religious art.
From the long colonial centuries came a thoroughly mixed people. The Spanish and the indigenous mingled, and African people brought in bondage to the coast mingled too, until most Ecuadorians today are of mixed descent. The greater part of the nation is mestizo, a blend of indigenous and Spanish; on the warm coast lives a distinct people of mixed farming and fishing stock, the montubio, with their own customs and pride; and in the coastal province of Esmeraldas and the highland Chota valley live the Afro-Ecuadorians, whose ancestors were brought from Africa and whose drumming and marimba music are among the treasures of the country.
This mixing has not been without its lines and its hurts, and an old distance has long separated the European and mestizo from the indigenous and the African. Yet from the mingling has come the whole texture of modern Ecuador, its faith and language, its food and music, and a nation woven of many strands.
The two tables
Ecuador sets two very different tables, for the cooking of the highlands and that of the coast are worlds apart, divided by the wall of the mountains. In the cool highlands the food is hearty and built around the potato, the corn, and the pig. The best loved everyday dish is a thick, creamy soup of potato and cheese, eaten with avocado; there is the whole pig roasted until its skin turns crisp, called hornado, and the little fried potato cakes stuffed with cheese, the llapingachos, that go beside it; there is pork fried golden, hominy corn, and in some places the roasted guinea pig kept for a feast. Ecuadorians are a soup-loving people, and a meal often begins with a bowl.
Down on the coast the table changes entirely. Here the potato gives way to the plantain, fried green into discs or mashed into balls, and the sea rules the plate. The great coastal dish is a tangy fish stew thick with onion, the encebollado, eaten in the morning and sworn by as a cure for the night before; there is shrimp cured in lime, the Ecuadorian form of the dish the whole coast loves, and fish and shellfish cooked in the milk of the coconut. A mild fresh chili sauce stands on every table, north and south alike.
Drink and welcome bind it together. In the cold highlands a hot drink of sugar, cinnamon, and cane spirit warms the evening, the canelazo; across the country the great meal is the midday lunch, and a cheap and generous set lunch of soup, meat, and rice feeds the working day. Markets brim with fruit unknown elsewhere, and food is set before a guest as a matter of course. To eat in Ecuador is to taste two countries in one.
The fused festival year
The Ecuadorian year is full of festivals, and almost all of them join the Catholic faith to the older Andean one. In June the northern highlands keep the festival of the sun and the harvest, Inti Raymi, an old Andean thanksgiving for the ripening fields now wound together with the feast of Saint John, days of dancing, music, and ritual bathing in the streams. Holy Week in spring is kept with solemn processions and with a great soup of many grains eaten only then. Carnival before Lent brings flowers and fruit and water thrown in play, and towns honour their patron saints and Virgins through the year with parades of costumed dancers, among them the famous masked festival of the Black Mama in the highland town of Latacunga.
The dead are honoured with special tenderness. At the start of November, for the Day of the Dead, families gather at the graves of their people, and everyone drinks a thick, warm, purple fruit drink called colada morada, eaten with little sweet breads shaped and decorated like babies, the guaguas de pan. The custom reaches back before the Spanish and has been woven into the Christian feast.
Music runs through it all. Ecuador's own national song is a tender, melancholy form of guitar ballad, the pasillo, beloved across the country; the highlands have their own bright dance music, carried by the panpipes and flutes of the Andes; and on the coast the Afro-Ecuadorians play the marimba, the wooden xylophone of their ancestors. Devout, colourful, and musical, the festival year is among the deep joys of Ecuadorian life.
Andean weaving and the Otavalo
In the highlands the old culture is woven and worn, for Ecuador shares the great Andean tradition of weaving and keeps it gloriously alive. Nowhere more than in Otavalo, whose name is known to weavers and traders the world over. On simple looms the people spin and weave the wool of the sheep and the alpaca into cloth, ponchos, and blankets of deep colour and fine skill, and the great Otavalo market, heaped with textiles, is one of the famous sights of the Andes.
The dress of the highland people is distinctive and proudly kept. The Otavalo man is known at a glance by his single long black braid, his white calf-length trousers, his dark poncho, and his felt hat; the woman by her embroidered white blouse, her wrapped dark skirt called the anaco, her shawl, and the strands of golden beads wound about her neck and wrists. Other highland peoples have their own colours and forms, the black dress of the Saraguro in the south, the bright cloth of other valleys, so that a person's home community can often be read in what they wear.
The weaving is more than craft. Its patterns carry meaning and memory, handed down through the generations, and the markets where the cloth is sold and worn are the beating heart of highland life, where people come to trade, to meet, and to show their finest. In its weaving and its dress, Ecuador carries its indigenous heritage not as a memory but as a living, daily pride.
Courtesy and the family
Ecuadorian manners are warm, personal, and rooted in the family. A greeting among friends and kin is unhurried and physical, a handshake among men, a kiss on the cheek between women or between a man and a woman, and people give time to the courtesies of meeting and parting rather than rushing them. Relations come before business, and a thing goes better begun with warmth and a little talk; respect for elders runs through everything.
The family is wide and close, reaching out through grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, and wider still through the godparents bound to a child at its baptism, a tie taken as seriously as blood and carrying real duties of help and support. In the highlands this widens further into the community and its old habit of working together, neighbours turning out for one another at planting, harvest, and the raising of a house. Hospitality flows from the same spirit: a guest is offered food and drink without question and pressed to take more.
Manner differs across the country's worlds. The people of the highlands are often quieter, more formal, and slower to open to a stranger; the people of the coast are quicker, louder, and more easily familiar, ready with a joke and a nickname. Both prize warmth and good humour, and both hold the family at the centre of life. The visitor who greets warmly, shows respect to the old, accepts the food and drink pressed upon them, and meets the country's differences with an easy temper will find the Ecuadorian welcome generous and genuine.
The nation
Ecuador is a small country straddling the equator on the Pacific coast of South America, holding within its modest bounds four worlds: the coast, the Andean highlands, the Amazon, and the Galapagos Islands far out in the ocean. Some eighteen million people live there. The highland capital, Quito, the oldest of the continent's capitals, sits high beneath a volcano; the great port of Guayaquil on the coast is the largest city and the heart of its trade; and the southern highland city of Cuenca is a third colonial jewel. Most Ecuadorians are of mixed descent, with indigenous, coastal mixed-farmer, and Afro-Ecuadorian peoples beside them, and Spanish shares official place with the indigenous tongues of Kichwa and Shuar.
Its history is long. Ancient peoples farmed the coast and highlands and built a loose kingdom around Quito before the Inca drew the land into their empire from the south in the fifteenth century, making Quito a northern seat of their rule; the Spanish overthrew them and governed for three centuries from the mountain capital. Independence came with a battle on the slopes above Quito in 1822, after which Ecuador joined and then left the great union of Gran Colombia, becoming in 1830 a separate republic and taking the name of the equator. The republic since has known much political turmoil, and in our own day adopted the United States dollar as its money and wrote the rights of nature into its law.
Today Ecuador is a democracy of striking variety, its wealth drawn from the oil of the Amazon, from being one of the world's great growers of bananas, from shrimp, fine cacao, and flowers, and from the visitors drawn to old Quito and the wonders of the Galapagos. Beneath the modern surface the four worlds endure, the highlands and the coast each keep their character, the old languages are still spoken, Mother Earth is still thanked, the festivals still danced, and the bond between Ecuador's many peoples and their varied, ancient land remains at the centre of everything.