Otavalo

The valley was home to Indigenous peoples — the Sarance and others — long before the Inca. The Inca, under Túpac Yupanqui, pushed north towards Atuntaqui, Cayambe and Otavalo and met hard resistance before they could take control. The Spanish chroniclers of 1534 name Otapalu as a powerful chief, and the colonial settlement was begun by the first encomendero in the same year, on the site of the Indigenous town that gave it its name.

Under Spanish rule Otavalo was one of the most important towns of the northern Audiencia, until the creation of Imbabura province with Ibarra as its capital. A description of 1582 lists seven villages in its district, among them Sarance and San Pablo by the lake. In 1673 the town was moved to its present site. Its farming and crafts made it a source of wealth; one later factory, San Pedro, where Otavaleños worked in harsh conditions for generations, is now the community's living museum.

Otavalo became a canton in 1824. In the early hours of 16 August 1868 an earthquake devastated the town, leaving only a bridge at Peguche, a mill and a bathhouse standing, and its churches had to be rebuilt. In the 20th century the market grew from a local exchange into one of the best known in South America; the Plaza de los Ponchos was built in 1970, and tourism became the town's main industry. In 2015 the railway line to Ibarra, closed around 1980, was reopened for tourist trains.

The Kichwa Otavalo people are famous for weaving, usually in wool, and for their success as traders, selling textiles and crafts around the world. Their dress is distinctive. Otavaleña women wear white embroidered blouses with flared lace sleeves, dark over-skirts and white under-skirts, with many strands of gold beads at the neck and coral beads wound round the wrists; men wear white trousers and dark blue ponchos.

Music is just as important. Otavalo's musicians travel widely, and groups from the town have had commercial success with Andean music abroad. At home, music is at the heart of Inti Raymi, the festival of the sun around the June solstice, when dancers and bands from the surrounding communities fill the streets. In Peguche and nearby villages Pawkar Raymi has been revived in recent decades in place of what was simply called Carnival. The fiesta of the yamor, built around a chicha of seven kinds of maize, began as a local gathering in the early 1950s and has grown into the town's main fiesta.

Crafts are tied to particular places around the town: leather in Cotacachi, woodcarving in San Antonio, weaving in Peguche and the other Otavalo villages.

According to the 2022 census, Otavalo had about 41,700 inhabitants, most of them Otavalo Kichwa. The town was historically a centre of farming communities on the rich volcanic soils of the valley, and agriculture is still one of its main activities, but tourism and the craft trade have become the economic mainstays, and Otavalo has many more hotels, hostels and tour operators than other towns of similar size.

The week turns on Saturday, when the market takes over almost a third of the town and buses from Quito and the villages fill up. On other days the Plaza de los Ponchos is quieter, and local life centres on the Mercado 24 de Mayo, the banks and offices around Parque Bolívar, and the bus terminal. Many Otavalos travel around the world to sell their crafts or play in Andean music groups.

Change in the market is a running concern: many of the goods sold there are now mass-produced in nearby factories and sold by middlemen rather than made by hand, and visitors who want handmade work are pointed towards the villages and the community museum.

Otavalo eats from the highland pantry of maize, potatoes and pork. In the markets and at the food stalls around the Plaza de los Ponchos, hornado, whole roast pig, is served with mote hominy and llapingachos, fried potato-and-cheese patties, while fritada is pork simmered and then fried in its own fat. Locro de papa, a thick potato soup with cheese, is eaten across the highlands, and the almuerzo set lunch is the everyday meal.

The town's own drink is the chicha del yamor, a fermented drink made from seven kinds of maize — yellow, white, black, chulpi, popping maize, morocho and jora, the germinated maize — that are dried, ground and cooked together. It is linked to the fiesta that bears its name, and the word yamor is thought to have been brought to northern Ecuador by the Inca.

The Mercado 24 de Mayo is the place to see what local families buy and eat, with stalls of produce, meat and cooked meals. Nearby towns add their own specialities: Ibarra, a short bus ride north, is famous for helados de paila, sorbets churned by hand in bronze pans over ice.