Salinas

People have lived at the tip of the peninsula for thousands of years. In 2005 a wave-cut collapse on the seafront exposed a small Valdivia pot, and excavations around the San Lorenzo district and the museum on the malecón have turned up funerary urns with burials and beads cut from spondylus shell. The museum's collection covers the Valdivia, Machalilla and Engoroy cultures through to the Huancavilca, whose balsa rafts carried spondylus along the Pacific, and finds from a Spanish galleon that ran aground off the coast in 1654.

At the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th the people of the area were almost all artisanal fishermen. Salinas became a rural parish of Santa Elena canton on 30 June 1929, and on 22 December 1937 a decree signed by General Alberto Enríquez Gallo made it a canton of its own. From the 1940s the arrival of American military personnel at Chipipe, the building of the yacht club and then of large apartment blocks brought investment and rapid growth that has continued since.

La Libertad, the neighbouring city with the peninsula's oil fields, was part of Salinas canton until it became a separate canton in 1993, and Santa Elena became a separate province in 2007. The city hosted the ISA World Junior Surfing Games in 2009. Since about 2021 the coast as a whole has been at the centre of Ecuador's security crisis.

Salinas is the resort of Guayaquil's families, and its culture follows the beach calendar. From December to May, and especially at weekends, the malecón fills with holidaymakers from the city, the beaches are lined with parasols, and bars and clubs stay busy late.

The sea is the centre of life. Surfers ride San Lorenzo and Punta Carnero, which has staged national and international competitions; the yacht clubs of Salinas and Puerto Lucía, in La Libertad, host sailors and sport fishermen; and in the whale season boats take visitors out to watch humpbacks. The fishing community keeps its own trade going alongside tourism.

Craft is part of the seafront: artisans from Salinas, and others from Chile and Argentina, sell jewellery made from shells and South American crafts along the malecón. Like most of the coast, the town follows the Guayaquil football clubs Barcelona and Emelec, having no well-known club of its own, and its museum keeps the peninsula's pre-Hispanic and colonial past in view.

At the 2022 census the city of Salinas had about 35,000 people, while the urban area it forms with La Libertad and neighbouring towns holds more than 180,000. The city is divided into four urban parishes.

Tourism, fishing, construction and salt production are the main activities. Artisanal fishing supplies both local tables and the peninsula's processing industry, salt is drawn from the flats around the town, and many residents work at the state oil refinery in La Libertad. Seafront property is also a significant market, and Salinas is often described as one of the country's most sought-after places to buy.

The rhythm of the year matters more than that of the day: crowded weekends in the hot season, quiet weeks in the grey months. Like the rest of the coast, the peninsula lives with Ecuador's security crisis, and states of emergency and curfews have been imposed at times in the coastal provinces.

Salinas eats from the sea. Shrimp ceviche — shrimp in citrus juice with onion, served with popcorn and chifles, thin plantain chips — is the town's signature, sold from popular stands one street back from the malecón. Arroz marinero, rice cooked with mixed seafood, is another standard, along with encebollado, the fish, cassava and pickled-onion soup eaten as a hangover cure across the coast.

Beyond seafood, the coast's everyday dishes are easy to find: arroz con menestra, rice with lentils or beans and grilled meat, and carne en palito, grilled meat on a skewer. Breakfast is often a bolón de verde, a ball of mashed green plantain with cheese or pork crackling. As elsewhere in Ecuador, the usual midday meal is the almuerzo: a soup, a main course and a glass of fresh fruit juice, with seafood on the coast served alongside rice, lentils or plantain.

Fresh fruit juices are easy to find, and the bars on the seafront stay open late in the beach season.