Before bananas, there was forest. The Coastal Lowlands once carried tropical rainforest all the way to the Pacific - a dense, dripping canopy that has almost entirely disappeared. In its place: the banana farms that made Ecuador the world's largest banana exporter, the sugar cane fields of the Guayas basin, the rice paddies of Los Rios. El Oro Province calls itself the banana capital of the world and is not exaggerating. The transformation was brutal and it was fast. What remains of the original dry forest and moist forest ecosystems survives mostly in protected fragments, like the Ecuadorian dry forests which retain barely one percent of their original extent. The coast tells an honest story about what agriculture does to a landscape, and what it leaves behind when it is done.

The coastal dialect makes outsiders listen twice. Ecuadorians from the Andes speak a crisp, formal Spanish that moves deliberately. Coastal Ecuadorians speak fast, swallow their consonants, and share features with the Spanish of the Caribbean - particularly the way final s sounds dissolve into aspirated breath. Listen for long enough and the coastal accent stops sounding like carelessness and starts sounding like music. This is the Spanish of Afro-Ecuadorian Esmeraldas, of Guayaquil's port workers, of Manabi fishermen hauling in nets at dawn. It is the language in which encebollado is ordered and ceviche is argued about, where the right amount of lime matters enormously and everyone has an opinion about it.

The beach culture splits between two temperaments. Salinas, on the Santa Elena peninsula, is where middle-class Ecuadorians go on holiday - a curved bay, high-rise apartments, families with coolers, the orderly rituals of vacation. Drive north and the scene shifts. Montanita, a few hours up the coast, belongs to the surfers. The waves here break consistently enough to have drawn international attention, and the town has grown around that fact, with hostels spilling into thatched bars and travelers cycling through in long, sunburned rotations. The beach communities north of Guayaquil are the heart of Ecuadorian coastal tourism. South of Guayaquil, until the Peruvian border near Tumbes, the coast goes quieter - mangroves and shrimp farms and mostly working towns.

Coastal food punches above its weight. Ecuadorian ceviche differs from Peruvian - it tends to be soupier, served with leche de tigre pooling in the bowl, often made with shrimp rather than fish. Encebollado, the morning hangover cure and breakfast of fishermen, uses albacore tuna in a broth of tomato, onion, and yuca, served with chifles (fried plantain chips) and popcorn on the side. The combination sounds strange on paper. In practice, eaten at a plastic table by the water at seven in the morning, it is one of the great breakfasts in South America. Seafood defines the coast: corvina, shrimp from the Guayas estuary, the black scallops that move across the border from northern Peru. Guayaquil's markets are the nerve center of this economy, where fishermen unload before dawn and restaurants send buyers to pick through the catch.

Off the coast of Manabi sits a small island that tourists have nicknamed the Poor Man's Galapagos - Isla de la Plata, accessible from the town of Puerto Lopez. The nickname undersells it. The island hosts blue-footed boobies, frigatebirds, and albatross, and the waters around it see humpback whales between June and September during their migration. For travelers who cannot afford the airfare and expedition costs to reach the actual Galapagos, Isla de la Plata delivers a convincing taste of the same volcanic-island-meets-seabird-rookery experience. Machalilla National Park, on the adjacent mainland, preserves one of the most intact stretches of Ecuadorian dry forest remaining. Together they form the coast's richest natural draw.

Everything coastal eventually passes through Guayaquil. Ecuador's largest city by population, its main commercial port, and its international aviation hub, Guayaquil is the Pacific-facing engine of the country. From here buses fan out to every coastal town, international flights connect to Miami and Madrid, and the Guayas River delivers shrimp and bananas to the world. The city itself is not conventionally pretty - it traded colonial architecture for commerce long ago - but the malecon along the river has been rebuilt into a long pedestrian promenade, and the historic neighborhood of Las Penas climbs a steep hill of painted houses that photographs well at sunset. For aviators, Guayaquil's Jose Joaquin de Olmedo International Airport is the gateway.