Puerto Francisco de Orellana

The city takes its name from Francisco de Orellana, the Spanish lieutenant of Gonzalo Pizarro's 1541 expedition from Quito, who went ahead down the Napo and ended up sailing the whole length of the Amazon to the Atlantic, the first European to do so; he is believed to have set off from near the present town. In colonial times the area belonged to the Gobernación de Quijos, a territory the Spanish entered in search of gold and cinnamon, and later to the cantons of Quijos and Napo. Its original name was San Antonio de la Coca, and it is still popularly called El Coca, after the river on its eastern side.

For centuries the only way in or out was by river. By the mid-20th century only a few missionaries, rubber tappers and Indigenous people lived here; the Aguarico mission, entrusted to the Capuchins in 1953, built an airstrip in 1958–59, and the present town dates its founding to February 1956. The decisive change came with oil: after crude was found in the northern Oriente in the late 1960s, roads arrived, and settlers poured in from the highlands and from Manabí and Esmeraldas on the coast, later joined by Colombians fleeing violence at home.

On 30 July 1998 Orellana province was created from part of Napo, with Coca as its capital. In 2019 the city council renamed the urban parish, until then called Puerto Francisco de Orellana, simply Coca. The 2020 collapse of San Rafael Falls upstream set off erosion on the Coca river that destroyed bridges and oil pipelines, and in 2023 a national referendum approved a halt to oil drilling in Yasuní National Park.

Coca is a frontier city of newcomers. Most of its people are colonos — settlers or the children of settlers from the highlands and the coast — and their food, music and fiestas came with them. Catholic life centres on the cathedral built by the Capuchins, whose patron, the Virgen del Carmen, is honoured each 16 July, and since 2019 the city has also marked a Day of Coqueño Identity in February for the founding of the present town.

The forest peoples are the other half of the story. Amazonian Kichwa communities line the Napo, and the Waorani hold territory in and around Yasuní, where two related groups, the Tagaeri and Taromenane, live in voluntary isolation, protected by an untouchable zone in the south of the park. Indigenous communities pressed for more than ten years for the 2023 referendum on halting oil drilling in Yasuní, and many communities downriver run their own lodges and guided visits. The archaeological museum on the malecón, opened in 2015, presents the region's pre-Hispanic past.

The city's identity is bound up with oil, and arguments over it are part of public life: the jobs and roads it brought on one side, spills, pollution and the long legal battle with Chevron, which acquired Texaco, on the other.

At the 2022 census Coca had 51,281 people, the second-largest city in the Ecuadorian Amazon after Lago Agrio, and the wider urban area holds more than 70,000. The city forms a single urban parish, and eleven rural parishes make up the rest of Francisco de Orellana canton.

The economy rests on oil, transport, commerce, cattle ranching and farming. Oil companies and their contractors provide many of the jobs, and most people earn their living from formal and informal commerce, small and micro businesses, farming and fish farming. As the departure point for the lower Napo and Yasuní, the city also lives from tourism.

Life follows the heat and the rain. The city has an expanding urban bus service, unusual for the Amazon. Current concerns include oil spills and the implementation of the Yasuní vote, illegal gold mining along rivers, erosion on the Coca river, and crime, which is higher here than in the foothill towns.

Coca's cooking mixes the forest with the settlers' kitchens. Maito is the Amazon's signature dish: fish, frogs or poultry wrapped in bijao leaves and grilled over coals, served with boiled cassava. Caldo de carachama is a soup of armoured catfish, and chontacuros, the fat larvae of the palm weevil, are a traditional Amazonian food. Ayampaco is another cassava-based dish of the region.

Chicha de yuca, a thick fermented cassava drink prepared by women, is offered to visitors in Kichwa homes, and chicha de chonta is made from the fruit of the peach palm when it ripens. Guayusa, the leaf of a caffeinated holly, is brewed like tea. Naranjilla juice is everywhere, and the tart arazá is another Amazon fruit.

Because so many residents came from elsewhere, the everyday food of the city is the national almuerzo, the set lunch, alongside highland and coastal dishes brought by the settlers. Typical dishes listed for the city include maito of tilapia, carachama or cachama, seco de guanta and skewers of chontacuro, and the paiche, one of the largest freshwater fish, stands out among the river catch.