Guayaquil & the Pacific Coast

The coast holds some of the oldest settled cultures in the Americas. The Valdivia culture of the Santa Elena peninsula made some of the continent's earliest pottery, around 3500 BC, and was followed by Machalilla, Chorrera, Bahía, Jama-Coaque and La Tolita, whose goldsmiths in Esmeraldas worked platinum. By the Spanish conquest the Manteño-Huancavilca were seafarers who sailed balsa rafts along the Pacific trading spondylus shell, and in 1526 Pizarro's pilot met one of these rafts at sea. In Esmeraldas, Africans who escaped a wrecked slave ship in the 1550s formed free communities under leaders such as Alonso de Illescas, the root of the province's Afro-Ecuadorian culture.

Guayaquil, settled for good in the 1540s on the Guayas river, became the Pacific's great shipyard and was sacked by pirates in the seventeenth century. It declared independence on 9 October 1820. The cacao boom of the late nineteenth century made Guayaquil's planter families rich and the city the country's economic centre; the Liberal Revolution of 1895 was led by Eloy Alfaro, a native of Montecristi in Manabí. Disease hit the cacao plantations in the 1920s, and workers striking in Guayaquil were massacred on 15 November 1922. Bananas brought a new boom in the 1950s, followed by shrimp farms in the mangroves.

A 7.8-magnitude earthquake on 16 April 2016 killed more than 600 people, mostly around Pedernales, Manta and Portoviejo in Manabí. Since about 2021 the region has been at the centre of Ecuador's security crisis, as gangs tied to international cocaine trafficking fought for control of ports and prisons.

Coastal Ecuadorians, costeños, see themselves as open, loud, quick-talking and entrepreneurial, and the Guayaquil–Quito rivalry is argued over everything from accent to football. Guayaquil's great club rivalry, Barcelona against Emelec, is the country's fiercest derby. The montubio culture of the rural coast — cowboys, amorfino verse duels and straw hats — is strongest in Manabí, Guayas and Santa Elena, and montubios are recognised as a distinct people in the census.

Esmeraldas is the centre of Afro-Ecuadorian culture: marimba music, song and dance of the southern Colombian and Esmeraldan Pacific, listed by UNESCO as intangible heritage, is played at festivals and wakes. The Chachi and Awá peoples live in the northern forests. In Santo Domingo, the Tsáchila, known for the men's hair stiffened with red achiote, keep their language and healing traditions.

Montecristi and the villages of southern Manabí are where toquilla-straw hats were first woven, and fine hats are still made there. Carnival on the coast means water fights and packed beaches, and the fiestas of each town mix Catholic processions and all-night dances to salsa, cumbia and the local chicha music.

About half of Ecuador's people live on the coast. Guayaquil has around 2.7 million people, with Durán across the river; the other main cities are Santo Domingo, Machala, Manta, Portoviejo, Quevedo, Esmeraldas and Babahoyo. Santa Elena's Salinas is the traditional resort of Guayaquil families.

The coast earns most of Ecuador's non-oil exports: bananas from Los Ríos, Guayas and El Oro, where Machala calls itself the world's banana capital; shrimp from farms in the Gulf of Guayaquil and El Oro; cacao; Manta's tuna fleet and canneries; and the oil refinery and pipeline terminal at Esmeraldas. Zaruma, in the hills of El Oro, is a gold-mining town.

Life starts early and slows in the midday heat, with the day's big meal at lunchtime and evenings spent outdoors. The dominant issue is insecurity: extortion demands on shops, buses and fishermen, curfews at times of emergency, and families leaving the worst-hit neighbourhoods or the country. Floods in El Niño years, coastal erosion and the loss of mangroves to shrimp farms are other concerns.

Coastal cooking runs on seafood, green plantain, coconut and peanuts. Encebollado, a fish soup of albacore tuna, cassava and pickled red onion, is Guayaquil's breakfast and hangover cure; ceviche of shrimp, fish or black clams (conchas negras) comes with popcorn and chifles, thin plantain chips. Guayaquileños gather for cangrejadas, sessions of cracking boiled mangrove crabs, and eat seco de chivo, goat stew, and arroz con menestra, rice with lentils or beans and grilled beef. Breakfast is often a bolón de verde, a ball of mashed green plantain with cheese or pork crackling, or tigrillo, mashed plantain scrambled with egg and cheese, a dish from Zaruma.

Manabí has the most admired regional kitchen, built on peanuts and plantain: viche, a fish and seafood soup thickened with peanut; corviche, fried green-plantain and peanut dough filled with fish; tonga, rice and chicken in peanut sauce wrapped in a leaf; and salprieta, a condiment of toasted maize and peanut. Esmeraldas cooks with coconut milk: encocado of fish or shrimp, tapao, sun-dried fish cooked with plantain, and cocadas, coconut sweets. Pan de yuca, cheese bread made with cassava starch, is a popular snack, and fresh coconut water, batidos and chocolate from the region's own cacao are everywhere.

In Guayaquil, the Malecón 2000 follows the Guayas river past gardens, museums and the Moorish clock tower; at its northern end the painted houses of Las Peñas climb the 444 steps of Cerro Santa Ana to a lighthouse. Parque Seminario is known for the land iguanas that wander its lawns, and a footbridge crosses to the mangroves of Isla Santay. Guayaquil is also the gateway to the Galápagos.

West of the city, the Santa Elena coast runs from Salinas past Ballenita and Ayangue to Montañita, a surf village with a steady break and a lively night scene, and quieter Olón beyond. North of it, in Manabí, Puerto López is the base for Machalilla National Park: humpback whales breed offshore from mid-June to October, Isla de la Plata has blue-footed boobies and frigatebirds, and Los Frailes is a protected beach. The Agua Blanca community lives on a Manteño archaeological site. Further up the coast lie Montecristi and its hat weavers, Manta, Bahía de Caráquez and Canoa, a surf beach with cliffs, from which the northern beaches continue to Mompiche, Same and Atacames in Esmeraldas.

Inland, the cacao country of Los Ríos centres on Vinces, whose planter mansions earned it the nickname "little Paris", Babahoyo and Quevedo, where farms grow the fine-aroma Nacional cacao, and in El Oro the wooden balconies of Zaruma and the mangroves of the Jambelí archipelago.