Macas

Macas takes most visitors by surprise — including me, which is what happens when you arrive somewhere knowing almost nothing about it. I came overland from Riobamba through the Sangay pass, a road that runs through high páramo moor before descending steeply into the Upano River valley, and what I found was a small city of about fifteen thousand people perched on a bluff above one of the Amazon’s most beautiful tributary valleys, with the snowcapped cone of Sangay volcano — one of the world’s most continuously active — visible on clear mornings above the cloud that generally sits at the forest edge.

Macas is the capital of Morona-Santiago province and the main town in Shuar territory. The Shuar were known historically as Jíbaro — a Spanish corruption — and were famous enough for their practice of tsantsa, the shrinking of enemy heads, that the word became general vocabulary for a kind of fierce resistance to outsiders. The Shuar successfully fought off both the Inca and the Spanish and maintained sovereign control of their territory longer than almost any Amazonian people. What you encounter in Macas today is the contemporary version: Shuar families running cattle ranches and convenience stores, Shuar politicians in the regional government, Shuar artisan cooperatives selling ceramics with geometric anent designs at the Saturday morning market.

The town itself sits at a transitional altitude — cold enough for a sweater in the evenings, warm enough for jungle in the afternoon valleys. I walked down to the Upano River on my second morning, a forty-minute descent through farmland and secondary forest that rewards you with a view of a wide, braided river running over white gravel, rimmed on the far bank by primary forest that runs unbroken to the horizon. There was almost no one there. A woman washing clothes in a side channel, a boy with a fishing rod sitting absolutely still on a boulder. Sangay was erupting steadily above — a thin white column of steam and ash rising from the snow cone and bending east in the trade wind, crossing into the Amazon air.

I had the best roast pork of my entire time in Ecuador at a small restaurant in Macas, from a pig that had, the owner told me with some specificity, been roasting since four in the morning. It was served with mote — swollen white corn — and a salsa of tomato and ají that stained everything red. I ate too much and then walked through the market for an hour in the pleasant stupor that follows.

When to go: Macas is a year-round destination without extreme seasonal variation. The road from Riobamba is spectacular but occasionally closes in heavy rain — check conditions if arriving overland. Saturday is market day and the best day to be in town. Sangay is clearest in the morning before cloud builds; have coffee facing the volcano before anything else.