Archidona

I almost did not stop in Archidona. The bus from Tena was going further, the day was early, and the travel guides I had consulted described it in the tepid language used for places that do not photograph well. Then the bus swung around the corner of the main plaza and I saw the church, and I asked to be let off.

The Church of San Rafael in Archidona’s central plaza is painted in geometric patterns of black and white — not as decoration but as a structural assertion, thick graphic bands that wrap the entire facade and tower in a design that looks simultaneously Pre-Columbian and pop art. No other colonial church in Ecuador looks like this. It was built by Dominicans in the late nineteenth century, and I have no authoritative explanation for the paint scheme other than the obvious one: someone had a vision and the will to execute it. The plaza around it is green and quiet, with benches occupied by older men watching the street, and the combination of the outrageous church and the peaceful square around it creates a cognitive dissonance I found entirely appealing.

Archidona is a small town of about fifteen thousand people in the upper Napo valley, surrounded by cacao farms, orange groves, and secondary forest. The Kichwa communities here have cultivated cacao — the native variety called Nacional — for generations, and several farms offer visits where you can trace the bean from pod to fermentation box to drying table. I visited one with an older man named Alberto who showed me his fermentation boxes with the pride of a vintner showing his barrels. The cacao he grew, he explained, could produce chocolate that won international competitions, which it regularly did. He then gave me a raw cacao pod to split open and eat the white pulp off the seeds. It tasted like mango and lychee and entirely unlike chocolate, which is still one of the more surprising tastes I have encountered.

About thirty minutes from Archidona, upriver on dirt roads that require a four-wheel drive or a reliable mototaxi driver, a group of Kichwa petroglyphs are carved into a riverside rock face where the Napo runs narrow and fast. The carvings are weathered but legible — spirals, faces, serpentine forms — and there is no interpretive panel, no fencing, nothing between you and the rock except the sound of the river. My mototaxi driver, who had brought visitors here for years, sat on a boulder downstream and waited. A family of hoatzins — prehistoric-looking birds that smell, improbably, of cow manure — moved through the reeds on the far bank.

When to go: Archidona is worth a half-day from Tena or as a stop between Tena and Quito. Market day is Sunday. The petroglyphs are accessible year-round but the dirt track becomes unreliable in heavy rain — ask locally about conditions before heading out, and go by mototaxi rather than trying to drive it yourself.