Southern Ecuador

Why nobody sells this

Ask any travel search engine for a five-day route through southern Ecuador and you will get a good itinerary — Saraguro, Loja, Vilcabamba, Podocarpus, in the right order — followed by advice to rent a car or take the buses. The information exists. The trip does not.

That is not because the route is difficult. It is because the operators who could run it are in Quito, eight hours north, and the ones who are here mostly sell the four day-trips that fill themselves: Cajas, Ingapirca, Gualaceo, the city tour. Nobody's fault. It just leaves the best part of the south to people with a rental car and a map.

Our office is in Cuenca. This is the road we drive anyway.

Saraguro, and why you drive instead of fly

Two hours south of Cuenca the road climbs into Saraguro, an Indigenous Kichwa town where people still wear black wool every day — not as costume, not for the photograph, but because that is what people wear. The community tourism here is run by the families themselves, not licensed out to an agency in the capital.

You can fly Cuenca to Loja and skip it. Most people do. It is the single best argument for the car.

Loja and the drop into Vilcabamba

Loja is a colonial city that takes its music seriously — a conservatory, a symphony, and street corners where that is normal rather than notable. Past it the road falls away into the Vilcabamba valley: from Cuenca's 2,548 m down to 1,579 m, and you feel it the same afternoon. Warmer, greener, slower.

Vilcabamba is sold internationally as the "valley of longevity". That story is folklore and we are not going to repeat it. What is real is the walking, the climate and the birds.

Podocarpus, the reason to add the fifth day

Podocarpus National Park runs from high páramo down through cloud forest to Amazon foothills, which is why its bird list is one of the densest in a country that is already absurd for birds. A full day inside it is the difference between the four-day route and the five-day one.

The park has two entrances and they are two different places. Cajanuma, twenty minutes above Loja, sits at 2,853 m — cloud forest turning to páramo, cold, with 328 bird species on its eBird list. Bombuscaro, past Zamora, sits at 1,079 m — warm, level river trails, and 546 species. Same park, 1,774 metres apart, almost no birds in common.

We wrote the whole thing up separately, because nobody else had: Podocarpus National Park — the two sectors, the trails and the birds.

If you are still deciding whether to come south at all, the day trips from Cuenca are covered separately: things to do around Cuenca, ranked by altitude — which is the number that decides how the day goes and which nobody publishes.

The distances, since this is what people actually ask

The whole route drops a kilometre of altitude from start to finish, and that is most of what makes it comfortable:

Altitudes measured against NASA's SRTM elevation model at each town's coordinates — nobody publishes them consistently, and the figures that circulate for Vilcabamba in particular vary by hundreds of metres. Driving times are ours, on the road, in a normal vehicle.

There are buses between all of them and people do this route independently. The reason to have a vehicle is not comfort: it is that Saraguro, Cajanuma and Bombuscaro are all off the bus route, and those are the three reasons to come south in the first place.

How we build it

Private, with a driver-guide, no fixed departures and nobody else in the vehicle. We design the route, contract the hotels and the guiding, and coordinate it as the responsible party on the ground — the same way we do everywhere else, except that here we are also the people who live at the start of the road.

We have not put a price on this page yet. The rates for the southern circuit are being agreed with our local operating partner right now, and we would rather show you nothing than show you a number we would have to change. Ask us and we will quote it properly, with the hotels named.