Our final destination on our overland journey was Quito, Ecuador’s capital city, set high in the Andes. We last visited Quito many years ago back in 1989 when it was quite a poor city gently decaying through lack of economic activity. Today it has been significantly spruced up, with not only the grand plazas, churches and government buildings looking clean and freshly painted, but also the many low rise colonial buildings in the old city have been tidily cleaned up and painted too, many still maintaining their wrought iron balconies, complete with potted plants, above all the shop fronts.
The city has a reasonably prosperous feel to it, it being the centre of government and the centre of the Ecuadorean economy, though Guayaquil on the coastal lowlands near the sea probably is the centre of much of Ecuador’s export orientated agribusinesses. Many highrise condominiums cling to the hills surrounding Quito, some with shear drops down to the valley below.
The Spanish built Quito right on top of the old Inca city and in their typical style reused many of the Incas building materials to build their churches and other colonial buildings, so not much of the old Inca settlement remains. As with Lima and the other principal colonial cities, the churches contain a massive amount of wealth and ornate carvings and paintings. The San Franciscan Church, like its counterparts in Lima and La Paz, probably contains one of the largest amount of treasures, art and conspicuous wealth of all the San Franciscan Churches we have been too. It dominates one of the large plazas and stands elegantly in front of the surrounding mountains complete with white colonnades and imposing stairs to its large carved wooden doorways.
Some of the other large churches are more Jesuit in style with their carved columns and ornate entrances. The power of the church in the Spanish Colonial Americas must have been immense and the certainty of their faith was a powerful force to inspire the colonialists to dominate Latin America. Today the wealth on display in the churches sits uncomfortably with much of the poverty that still exists in Ecuador and elsewhere in Latin America, despite the significant economic progress made in the last 20 or so years.
Quito and, more broadly Ecuador with its dollarized economy, has become a magnate for many of the refugees fleeing the chaos that is modern day Venezuela and that has created a level of tension with the local Ecuadoreans who see the Venezuelans undercutting their wages as they are prepared to work for much less pay in order to simply survive. While Ecuador is poorer than neighbouring Peru and Colombia, the attractiveness of the US dollar as its currency has acted as a magnate for Venezuelan refugees which in turn has created underlying tensions in Equador.
Indeed one of our fellow travellers was mugged in the centre of Quito but, the whole episode was seen by the local undercover police, who caught the suspect and the same day tried him in front of the courts, which in turn sentenced him to 30 days in jail and a fine of $100. A very impressive and speedy process that would not have been out of place in the Back to the Future movies.
Date: 04/06/2018 to 05/06/2018