The first settlers came between 1700 and 1750, according to oral tradition - indigenous families from the Salty (Salado) and Balao regions of Guayas, displaced after Spanish conquest. They moved east along the left bank of the Rio Jubones, about 23 kilometers from where the river empties into the Pacific through the Jambeli channel, and built ranches from materials the land donated: cane, palm thatch, mud and wood. The site had a specific advantage for the regional economy: it sat upstream far enough to be sheltered from coastal storms but downstream enough for canoes to reach it with a single tide. Cocoa and coffee from the inland farms moved down the Jubones by canoe, were unloaded and reloaded at the mouth into larger sloops, and continued by sea to Guayaquil. El Guabo was the transfer point. The awnings - long thatched sheds where cocoa and coffee were spread to dry in sun and sea breeze - became the visual signature of the town's early economy.

Rivers do not always stay where they begin. In the early 1920s, the Rio Jubones changed course near El Guabo. Its original channel - the one that had run along what locals called La Playa, now Avenida del Ejercito - dried up, and the river abandoned its old bed for a new course. The change transformed the village. The dry riverbed became desirable land, and settlers filled in the former channel with new neighborhoods: La Victoria, Santa Cruz, El Placer, La Loma, 5 de Junio, El Despacho, Teniente Gustavo Ledesma, 3 de Julio, 30 de Abril, 20 de Enero, and La Toma. According to journalist and teacher Arnulfo Carvallo, whose collected records preserve much of this local history, the new channel settled into its present course by Christmas 1924. What had been a river became streets. What had been tied-up canoes became houses. The tree called El Guabo stood at what is now the intersection of 3 de Noviembre and Avenida del Ejercito, near the 3 de Julio neighborhood, right at the edge of the former riverbank.

Local tradition preserves a scrap of dialogue between montubio canoeists that captures the essence of the town's early economy. A canoe heading out is asked, Where are you going? The answer: To the Guabo. Bring more cocoa and coffee. The return question: How about you? The answer: I am going to the awnings, taking people to Guayaquil. I will return to Guabo bringing fish on the low tide. The exchange is rough, folkloric, and economic all at once. The awnings and the Guabo - the drying sheds at the coast and the upriver tie-up point - defined the two ends of the trade, and the men working the canoes moved between them with the tides. Montubios, the rural agricultural people of coastal Ecuador with a distinct mixed heritage, still make up a meaningful portion of the local population: 4 percent of El Guabo's residents identified as montubio in the 2010 census.

El Guabo developed slowly through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It became a liberal parish in 1882 and a small commercial river traffic point by the late 1920s. But formal canton status - elevation from parish to independent administrative district - took until September 7, 1978. The movement toward cantonization had been building throughout the mid-1970s, led by local officials and residents who saw it as essential for development. Once granted, canton status gave El Guabo its own municipal government, its own budget, and the ability to plan its own infrastructure. The date is now celebrated annually. The canton covers 580.2 square kilometers in the north of El Oro Province, bordered by Naranjal Canton to the north, the cantons of Machala and Pasaje to the south, Ponce Enriquez Canton to the east, and the Pacific Ocean via the Gulf of Guayaquil to the west. Five parishes make up the canton: El Guabo itself, Barbones (Sucre), La Iberia, Tendales (with administrative headquarters in Puerto Tendales), and Rio Bonito.

The coastal plain of El Guabo sits in the tropical humid climate zone. The canton's dominant crop - by far, to the exclusion of almost anything else - is bananas for export. El Oro Province calls itself the banana capital of the world, and the claim is hard to dispute: Ecuador is the world's largest banana exporter, and El Oro produces a disproportionate share of the country's crop. Flat terrain, reliable rainfall, proximity to the ports of Machala and Puerto Bolivar, and a workforce of roughly 50,000 people in the canton (the 2010 census recorded 50,009 residents, with the 2022 numbers likely higher) combine to make industrial-scale banana production economically viable here. The fruit grown in El Guabo reaches supermarkets across North America, Europe, and East Asia. The cocoa and coffee that gave the town its early economy are minor crops now; the cocoa groves still exist, but the scale has shifted permanently. Demographics of the canton reflect the coastal pattern: 82.3 percent mestizo, 6.9 percent Afro-Ecuadorian, 6 percent white, 4 percent montubio, 0.7 percent indigenous.

The original guabo tree that gave the canton its name is gone - no one marks the exact spot, though local history places it at what is now a specific intersection in the 3 de Julio neighborhood. Its descendants still grow in the region; guabo trees remain common along rural riverbanks, their seedpods still eaten as a sweet local fruit. The canton lives on an economy the tree never saw, producing a crop - bananas - that was not commercially important in Ecuador until the twentieth century. But the name carries the memory. Every bill of lading from the port of Machala labeled El Guabo is, without intending it, an homage to a riverside tree, to the montubio canoeists who tied their boats to its trunk, to a muddy village in the 1750s that existed at the intersection of cocoa, coffee, and the sea. The tree is gone. The name remains. The bananas ship out by the ton.