Nueva Loja

Until the middle of the 20th century, the forest along the Aguarico River was home to the Cofán and other Indigenous peoples, with only a few missionaries and rubber tappers among them. In 1964 Texaco began exploring for oil in north-eastern Ecuador, and a Texaco–Gulf consortium struck oil in 1967. A base camp grew up at the drilling site, and Texaco named it Lago Agrio, Spanish for Sour Lake, after the town of Sour Lake in Texas. Settlers followed, led by colonists from the southern province of Loja, and the official name, Nueva Loja, honours them.

The settlement grew fast and without planning. Its first school opened in 1971, the year Nueva Loja was legally founded, on 5 May, and full-scale oil production began in 1972; the crude is piped across the country to a marine terminal on the coast. Within half a century the camp had become the largest and most populous city of the Ecuadorian Amazon and the capital of Sucumbíos.

Oil also brought severe damage. Over Texaco's years of operation, waste water and crude were dumped in open pits and spread through the forest, and in 1993 residents began the class action Aguinda v. Texaco. Chevron, which acquired Texaco in 2001, was ordered by a court in Lago Agrio in 2011 to pay billions of dollars in damages, a ruling confirmed by Ecuador's highest court in 2013; in 2018 an arbitration tribunal in The Hague ruled in Chevron's favour, finding the judgment had been obtained through fraud and corruption. The case remains one of the most widely covered disputes involving Chevron.

Nueva Loja is a frontier town in its make-up. Most residents descend from settlers who came from the highlands and the coast with the oil roads, and the town's very name records the province of Loja that sent many of the first families. Around it live the Cofán, whose homeland the oil field occupies, and the Siona and Secoya of the Cuyabeno region, some of whom still keep knowledge of forest medicine and now run community tourism with the lodges.

The town calls itself the oil capital of Ecuador, and the industry shapes its identity as much as its economy. Football is the passion, as everywhere in the country: Nueva Loja is the home town of Antonio Valencia, the former Manchester United player, who started at the local club Caribe Junior. The Carlos Vernaza stadium, opened in 1990, hosts the provincial clubs and also serves for concerts and other cultural events.

The town has worked to change its image from an industrial camp to a place with ecological tourism, centred on the PERLA park and its lagoon, and on the reserves beyond. Sister-city ties with Iquitos in Peru reflect its place in the wider Amazon.

About 56,000 people lived in the city at the 2022 census, making it the most populous city in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and the wider urban area around it holds more than 80,000. It is the administrative centre of Sucumbíos, with the provincial government and the municipality of Lago Agrio canton, whose mayor, Abraham Freire Paz, was re-elected for 2023–2027.

The economy rests on the oil industry, followed by trade, cattle ranching and farming, and the town serves as the commercial and financial centre for the surrounding oilfields and settlements. Since 2016 the Universidad Estatal Amazónica has had a campus here. A small but growing municipal bus network serves the expanding barrios, many of which still have gravel streets, and the schools follow the highland calendar, running from September to July.

Days start early and are shaped by heat and rain. The legacy of oil pollution remains a public issue, and life near the Colombian border carries the security problems of the northern border zone, with armed groups and drug trafficking active in parts of Sucumbíos.

Food in Nueva Loja mixes the cooking the settlers brought from the highlands and the coast with the traditions of the Amazon. Set lunches, or almuerzos, are the everyday meal, as everywhere in Ecuador.

The Amazonian dish to look for is maito: river fish, or sometimes chicken, wrapped in leaves and cooked over coals, served with boiled cassava. Ayampaco is another cassava-based dish of the region. Chontacuros, the fat larvae of the palm weevil, are eaten grilled as a traditional delicacy, and caldo de carachama is a soup of armoured catfish.

The drinks are as distinctive. Chicha de yuca, a thick, mildly fermented cassava drink, is offered to visitors in Indigenous homes, and guayusa, the leaf of a caffeinated holly, is brewed like tea. Naranjilla is made into juice throughout the region, and Amazonian fruits include the tart arazá and the peach-palm fruit, chonta. Fine-aroma cacao is grown across the Amazon, and several community cooperatives in the region make their own chocolate.