Mompiche lies in a protected bend of coast that also shelters San Francisco at its northern end, and Muisne and La Mancha in between. Offshore sit the small islands of Portete, Bolivar, and Las Manchas - the last often called Isla Bonita - which can be reached by boat in about fifteen minutes. Between Mompiche and Portete is the black-sand beach, whose iron and titanium content comes from volcanic sources further up the coast. Surfers come for a consistent left-breaking point wave that works well on south and southwest swells. Sport fishermen come for the pelagics that patrol the outer bay. Backpackers come for the simplest reason: most of the Esmeraldas coast is being paved and developed, and Mompiche has so far been paved a little less.

Wikipedia describes the area as a pre-Columbian trading center connected to the Moche culture - a claim best treated with caution, since the best-documented Moche sites lie in northern Peru. What is not in doubt is that indigenous peoples lived here for centuries before European arrival, and petroglyphs and other artifacts have been found in the area. The 16th century brought Spanish ships to this coast, and with them the familiar pattern of Christian conversion, the enslavement of indigenous people for work in mines and plantations, and the later importation of enslaved Africans to work the sugar and cacao plantations that spread along the Esmeraldas lowlands. The contemporary population of Mompiche and surrounding towns is heavily Afro-Ecuadorian, a demographic legacy of that forced movement of people - and the source of the distinctive music, cuisine, and culture that mark the Esmeraldas coast today.

Mompiche's tourism economy is quiet by the standards of Ecuador's better-known beach towns. Artisanal fishing and tourism are the two main livelihoods, and the tourism lean is mostly international - European and North American travelers looking for a stretch of coast where the sun goes down without a line of concrete hotels in the way. The town's infrastructure has not caught up with even that small scale of visitors. There is no municipal drinking-water system. Tanker trucks deliver water to residents. In January 2021, a strong ocean swell damaged the seaside boardwalk, and residents organized themselves to reinforce the breakwater wall, having waited without success for government help. In 2017, locals had already pushed back against mining companies extracting the valuable iron-titanium black sands, the same sands that give the nearby beach its color.

North of Mompiche, further up the Esmeraldas coast, lies the Cayapas-Mataje Ecological Reserve - 51,300 hectares of coastal wetland and, reportedly, the tallest mangroves on Earth. Within the reserve are guandales, swampy areas with unstable soils supporting cungare, tangare, sijo, sande, and anime trees. Mompiche is not in the reserve, but it sits in the same coastal ecosystem and shares the same climatic and ecological patterns. Visitors staying in Mompiche often make the trip north to see the mangroves, which form part of the same northwestern coastal strip that shelters the black-sand beach, the pelagic fishing grounds, and the small towns where the Pacific has not yet been entirely rebuilt for tourists.