Travel guide

Ecuador Travel Guide

Ecuador packs four distinct biomes — Andes, Amazon, Pacific coast, and the Galápagos — into a country smaller than the United Kingdom. You can have breakfast in a Quito colonial-era courtyard at 2,850 m, lunch in the cloud forest at Mindo with 500+ bird species overhead, and dinner on the Pacific coast the same day. Quito's historic centre was inscribed on the very first UNESCO World Heritage List in 1978 (alongside Kraków, the Galápagos, and ten others) and remains one of the largest and best-preserved colonial old towns in the Americas — La Compañía de Jesús with its seven tonnes of gold leaf, San Francisco's Quito School paintings (a 17th-century fusion of Italian Renaissance technique and Andean iconography), the Plaza Grande, and the funicular up Pichincha for the rooftop view. North of Quito, Otavalo runs one of South America's oldest continuously operating indigenous markets, where Kichwa-speaking weavers sell textiles in the same Saturday plaza their ancestors used in pre-Inca times. South, the Avenue of Volcanoes — named by Alexander von Humboldt in 1802 — strings together Cotopaxi (5,897 m, one of the world's tallest active volcanoes), Chimborazo (6,263 m, whose summit is the point on Earth's surface farthest from the planet's centre owing to the equatorial bulge), and Cayambe along the Panamericana. The Galápagos, roughly 1,000 km offshore, are where Charles Darwin made the observations in 1835 that became On the Origin of Species; entry requires a transit control card plus a national park fee, both payable in cash on arrival — check current amounts before travel. The Amazon east of the Andes — Yasuní National Park is widely cited as the most biodiverse spot on the planet — is reached via Coca, Lago Agrio, or Tena, then by canoe and small bush flight. Ecuador adopted the US dollar as its national currency in 2000, which removes exchange-rate friction for US, UK, AU, CA visitors and makes budgeting unusually transparent.

Updated 2026-08-15