Lago Agrio

Lago Agrio — Nueva Loja, officially, but no one calls it that — was founded by Texaco in 1967 as a base camp for oil extraction. The company arrived, drilled, and left behind three hundred open waste pits filled with crude, heavy metals, and produced water. Chevron, which acquired Texaco, spent decades in court denying responsibility for what various studies have called the largest petroleum contamination in history. The lawsuit became a landmark in international environmental law and is still, in various iterations, being argued. I knew all of this before I arrived, which meant I knew that the reddish-brown slick on the creek I passed on the road into town was not naturally that color.

And yet Lago Agrio is a real city, a working place of around sixty thousand people, and it functions as the gateway to some of the finest wildlife watching in South America. The Cuyabeno reserve is ninety minutes away. The morning I arrived I walked the market — a covered labyrinth of stalls selling jungle fruits I could not name, dried herbs, plastic kitchenware, and one aisle dedicated exclusively to rubber boots in every possible size — and ate a desayuno of fried egg, rice, beans, and plantain at a place with plastic tables on the sidewalk, the woman at the counter watching a telenovela on a phone propped against the salt shaker. The coffee was strong and sweet and came in a small glass. The whole meal cost a dollar-fifty.

The city has a rough-edged vitality that I associate with frontier towns. Mototaxis outnumber taxis by about ten to one. The main avenue has a strip of restaurants advertising Colombian food alongside Ecuadorian, a reminder that the Colombian border is thirty kilometers north and the population here blends both. I had bandeja paisa — beans, rice, chicharrón, egg, avocado — at a restaurant run by a couple from Pasto who had come south in the 1990s and never left. The food was excellent and far from delicate, and the portion was so large I carried half of it back to the hotel for later.

Lago Agrio is not a destination in itself. It is a threshold. What I kept noticing, though, was the way the forest pressed in on all sides — even here, at this density of diesel fumes and market noise, you could look down any side street and see green. The Amazon is always just past the edge of what human activity has cleared, and in Lago Agrio that edge is very close. Walking toward it at dusk, watching the last light catch the crowns of the trees that start two blocks from the bus terminal, I understood why people came here first, and why some stayed.

When to go: Lago Agrio functions as a transit point year-round; there is no bad time to pass through. Cuyabeno tours depart from here regardless of season. Come with a specific next destination in mind — stay long enough to eat well, leave the next morning.