Ecuador

Long before the Inca, the Andes of Ecuador were home to farming chiefdoms: the Quitu and Cara in the north, the Puruhá in the centre and the Cañari around today's Cuenca. On the coast, the Valdivia culture made some of the oldest pottery in the Americas, more than 5,000 years ago.

The Inca pushed north in the late 15th century. Túpac Yupanqui and his son Huayna Cápac took the highlands after years of resistance, and Quito became the empire's northern capital. When Huayna Cápac died, his sons Atahualpa (based in Quito) and Huáscar (in Cusco) fought a civil war; Atahualpa had just won when the Spanish arrived in 1532.

Sebastián de Benalcázar took Quito in 1534, after the Inca general Rumiñahui had burned it rather than hand it over. The city was rebuilt as San Francisco de Quito, and in 1563 it became the seat of the Real Audiencia de Quito, an administrative unit roughly matching today's country.

Colonial Quito became a centre of religious art: the 'Quito school' of painters and sculptors, many of them Indigenous and mestizo artisans, filled churches such as La Compañía with gilded carving. Behind it lay the hacienda and textile-workshop system that bound Indigenous labour for centuries.

Quito's 1809 uprising is remembered as the 'first cry' of independence in Spanish America, though it was crushed. Independence came in 1822 when Antonio José de Sucre's army won the Battle of Pichincha on the slopes above Quito. The region joined Simón Bolívar's Gran Colombia, then left it in 1830 as the Republic of Ecuador.

The 19th century swung between conservative Quito and liberal Guayaquil. García Moreno built a Catholic state in the 1860s–70s; Eloy Alfaro's liberal revolution of 1895 separated church and state and finished the railway from Guayaquil to Quito before he was murdered by a mob in 1912.

Cacao and then bananas made the coast rich; oil in the Amazon from the 1970s paid for roads and a larger state but left spills and debt. Ecuador lost much of its claimed Amazon territory to Peru in 1941–42 and fought again in 1995 before the 1998 peace treaty.

A banking collapse in 1999 wiped out savings and led to dollarisation in 2000. Rafael Correa's decade (2007–17) brought a new constitution, spending on roads and schools, and conflict with the press. Since 2021, cocaine trafficking gangs have fought for ports and prisons; in January 2024 the government declared an 'internal armed conflict', and emergency rule has recurred since.

Ecuador has about 18 million people. Most identify as mestizo; Indigenous nations make up a significant minority, alongside Afro-Ecuadorians (concentrated in Esmeraldas and the Chota valley) and Montubios, the rural people of the coastal plains.

Kichwa, a variety of Quechua, is spoken across the highlands. The Otavalo Kichwa are known for weaving and trade that reaches far beyond Ecuador; the Saraguro of the south dress in black. In the Amazon live the Shuar, Achuar, Waorani, Siona, Secoya, Cofán and Kichwa of the lowlands, plus uncontacted groups in Yasuní.

The Indigenous movement, organised through CONAIE since 1986, is one of the strongest in the Americas. National uprisings and road blockades have toppled governments and forced back fuel-price rises; strikes in 2019, 2022 and 2025 paralysed the highlands for days.

The 2008 constitution calls Ecuador a plurinational state and gives legal rights to nature (Pachamama). Courts have used those rights to stop mining in cloud forests, and in a 2023 referendum voters chose to leave oil in the ground in part of Yasuní.

Ecuadorian cooking follows its regions. In the Andes, soups carry the meal: locro de papa with cheese and avocado, yahuarlocro with blood sausage, and on Holy Week the fanesca of grains and salt cod. Roast pork (hornado), fried pork (fritada) and mote (hominy) fill markets.

The coast cooks with green plantain, shrimp and fish. Encebollado, a tuna soup with pickled onion, is breakfast and hangover cure in Guayaquil; Esmeraldas stews fish in coconut milk (encocado). Ecuadorian ceviche is soupier than Peru's and comes with popcorn.

The set lunch, almuerzo, is how most people eat out: soup, a plate of rice with meat or fish, juice and sometimes dessert for a few dollars. Fruit juices from naranjilla, tree tomato and passion fruit are everywhere.

Ecuador grows some of the world's finest cacao, the 'nacional' variety, and bean-to-bar chocolate makers in Quito and Guayaquil have made it a point of pride.

The Galápagos lie about 1,000 km off the coast, volcanic islands that rose from the sea floor and were never joined to a continent. Everything that lives there arrived by swimming, flying or drifting, which is why tortoises, iguanas, finches and mockingbirds differ from island to island.

Charles Darwin spent five weeks there in 1835 aboard HMS Beagle. The observations fed into his theory of evolution by natural selection, published in 1859. Ecuador declared most of the archipelago a national park in 1959, and it became one of the first UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1978.

Today about 30,000 people live on four islands, and visitors are managed with fees, licensed guides, fixed visitor sites and quarantine checks. The park fee for foreign adults doubled to US$200 in August 2024, and every arrival needs a transit control card bought on the mainland.

The pressures are introduced species (goats, rats, blackberry), overfishing, plastics and the growth of tourism itself. Eradication programmes have restored islands such as Pinta and Santiago, and giant tortoises have been returned to islands where they had vanished.

The practical map of Ecuador in 2026 is shaped by security. Coastal provinces, including Guayas with Guayaquil, carry strong warnings from several governments, and states of emergency with curfews have been declared repeatedly — most recently from 15 September 2026 across eight provinces. Most visitors now use Guayaquil only as an airport.

The highlands and the Galápagos remain the core of a trip. Quito's metro (2023) has made the long city easier to cross, buses along the Pan-American Highway are cheap and frequent, and short flights link Quito with Cuenca and the islands.

Altitude is the other constant. Quito is at about 2,850 m, Cotopaxi's refuge near 4,800 m. Plan an easy first day, and do the high hikes after several nights up.

The US dollar makes costs easy to read. Carry small notes, cash for the Galápagos fee and a card for city hotels, and follow official alerts for volcanoes, strikes and security measures.