Ecuador & Amazon

Why Ecuador & Amazon works

Ecuador, officially the Republic of Ecuador, is a country in northwestern South America bordered by Colombia to the north, Peru to the east and south, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Its capital is Quito, and its largest city is Guayaquil. According to the Ecuadorian government's foreign ministry, the country covers 256,370 square kilometres, and it lies between latitudes 2°N and 5°S with 2,337 kilometres of Pacific coastline and 2,010 kilometres of land border, split between a 590-kilometre frontier with Colombia and a 1,420-kilometre frontier with Peru — making Ecuador larger than the South American countries of Uruguay, Suriname, Guyana, and French Guiana.

Spanish colonization brought new infectious diseases such as smallpox that caused high fatalities among the Amerindian population, who had no immunity, while the encomienda labour system forced natives to work for Spanish settlers. Quito became the seat of a Spanish real audiencia in 1563, first under the Viceroyalty of Peru and later the Viceroyalty of New Granada, and after nearly 300 years of Spanish rule the city's criollos called for independence on 10 August 1809, the first such call among the peoples of Latin America. The Department of Guayaquil became the first Ecuadorian territory to gain independence, on 9 October 1820, and the rest of the country followed after Antonio José de Sucre defeated Spanish royalist forces at the Battle of Pichincha near Quito; Ecuador then joined Simón Bolívar's Republic of Gran Colombia before separating in 1830 to become an independent republic, annexing the Galápagos Islands two years later.

East of the Andes, Ecuador's territory extends into the Amazon basin, the largest tract of tropical rainforest in the Americas, which as a whole spans 7 million square kilometres across nine nations and 3,344 indigenous territories, with roughly 1% of the basin lying within Ecuador. Wet tropical forests are the most species-rich biome on Earth, and the Amazon holds an exceptional concentration of biodiversity even among them: one in ten of the world's known species lives there, including at least 40,000 scientifically classified plant species, 2,200 fish species, 1,294 bird species, 427 mammal species, 428 amphibian species, and 378 reptile species, alongside an estimated 2.5 million insect species. One in five of all bird species, and one in five of all fish species, are found within the Amazon and its rivers.

Ecuadorian cuisine varies with altitude, agricultural conditions, and the country's different ethnic communities, though most regions share a traditional three-course structure of soup, a course pairing rice with a protein, and dessert with coffee. Agricultural products from the coastal Costa, highland Sierra, and Amazonian Oriente regions include bananas, cocoa beans, coffee, sugar, potatoes, corn, barley, rice, wheat, and tropical fruits. Along the coast, seafood dominates, with prepared fish, shrimp, and ceviche integral to the diet, alongside beef dishes such as churrasco and arroz con menestra y carne asada, rice with beans and grilled beef served with fried plantain — a dish considered emblematic of Guayaquil.

Ecuador's geography, spanning coastal lowlands, the Andean sierra, and the Amazonian Oriente within a relatively compact national territory, gives the country an unusually condensed range of environments to move between. That range runs from the Pacific coastline in the west, across the mountains around Quito, to the rainforest basin in the east, where Ecuador's share of the wider Amazon — though modest in proportion to the basin's dominant share held by Brazil, at 58.4%, and the larger shares held by Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Venezuela — still opens directly onto one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet.

• Ecuador — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Amazon rainforest — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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