The Tsachila, whose name roughly means true people, occupied the foothills where the western Andes step down toward the Pacific. Archaeologists in La Mana have recovered clay vessels, zoomorphic statuettes with deliberate ornaments, and pots that show evidence of high-temperature use. The presumption is that the Tsachila used those containers to smelt metals drawn from surrounding mountains. What remains of their visible presence in La Mana is fragmentary, but it is enough to indicate a sophisticated metallurgical tradition. They were not the simple agriculturalists colonial accounts sometimes described. They were miners, metallurgists, and traders who understood the land long before anyone called it La Mana.

By the twentieth century, La Mana had grown large enough and distinct enough to want its own political identity. The legislative Committee of Civil and Penal Law sent a bill to create the canton, and on May 19, 1986, under the government of President Leon Febres Cordero, La Mana officially became the sixth-largest canton in Cotopaxi Province. The canton covers 66,258 acres. It is named both for the town and for the territory around it. Unusual among Ecuadorian settlements, La Mana was not founded by one migrating indigenous group or by a specific colonial expedition. People came from all over the country, drawn by the land's fertility, and they brought their customs with them. The result is a town that is less a single culture than a braid of several.

At the center of La Mana stands a monument to Carlos Lozada Quintana. He owned the La Merced Hacienda, a large landholding that once dominated the area. When the town began to organize itself around the amenities a modern community needs, he did something remarkable. He donated his lands for plazas, parks, streets, schools, and the basic services that let a settlement grow. Without him, the public spaces of La Mana would not exist in the form they do today. His name is not in any Ecuadorian national history book most foreigners would read, but every Lamanense knows it. The statue reminds them that not all wealth in the country has traveled one direction.

La Mana sits in the foothills of the western Andean mountain range, on an alluvial plain layered with volcanic ash and sand from unnamed ancient eruptions. The main town rests on an old terrace of the San Pablo River. Climates stack vertically here. Move uphill and you pass through subtropical bands into tropical heat. The canton grows bananas, orito, yucca, cocoa, tobacco, and coffee on an industrial scale. It also holds gold. The Canaveral, a natural gold mine, sits 12 kilometers from the town center, and other mineral deposits lace the underlying rock. Agriculture and mining together made La Mana economically significant far beyond its size, and they continue to shape daily life.

Among the attractions spread across the surrounding landscape, Las 7 Cascadas, a chain of natural waterfalls in the neighboring Pangua Canton, draws the most visitors. Closer in, the Cascada Guadual drops 25 meters into a natural pool 15 kilometers from Pucayacu. The Cascada de Brasil tumbles another 15 meters into an emerald-green lagoon. Even more striking is Hacienda Malqui, a cattle ranch an hour and a half from La Mana. Its stones turned out not to be a pile of field boulders but an archaeological site connected to the tomb of Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor. Malqui means body or mummy of the Inca ancestors. The site is believed to have been a populated ceremonial center, and today it forms part of the Malqui Machay cultural project. The past here is not buried deep. It sits on the surface, under layers that were never very thick.