Francisco Pacheco, a Spanish captain, founded Villa Nueva de San Gregorio de Portoviejo on March 12, 1535, making it one of the oldest cities in Ecuador. The original site was on the coast, but constant attacks from indigenous populations forced the settlers to relocate inland in 1628, about 30 kilometers from the Pacific, where the Portoviejo River carves a valley through Manabi province. Tamarind plantations once surrounded the town, and the nickname Royal Tamarind City stuck long after the plantations dwindled. The city became the capital of Manabi province and the political and economic heart of a valley where 110 square kilometers of land are still cultivated every year. Today it is Ecuador's eighth-largest city, a working place with universities and cathedrals and a tradition of coffee and cattle and fishing that long predates its culinary fame.

The Pacific plate grinds beneath the South American plate off the coast of Ecuador, and that interface produces some of the most powerful earthquakes on Earth. The 2016 rupture occurred about 20 kilometers below the surface near Muisne, with Pedernales roughly 35 kilometers from the epicenter and Portoviejo farther south, but the energy traveled. Buildings in the historic center collapsed. The cathedral survived but suffered serious damage. The local airport, closed by presidential order in 2011, became an emergency shelter for thousands of displaced residents. More than 300 people died in Portoviejo alone, and thousands more were injured. Across Ecuador, the death toll exceeded 670. What followed was the painful, uneven work of reconstruction: clearing rubble, burying the dead, rebuilding homes, and trying to figure out what kind of city to rebuild.

Portoviejo's answer was gastronomy. Manabi cuisine draws on deep coastal traditions: peanut-thickened seafood stews, plantain-based dishes like bolon and tigrillo, corundas and encebollados, and the use of green bananas and yuca in ways that mark the region as distinct from the Andean cuisine further east. Ministry of Culture recognition arrived first, declaring Manabi gastronomy intangible heritage of Ecuador on October 18, 2018, marking the 198th anniversary of Portoviejo's independence. UNESCO followed in October 2019, naming Portoviejo to its Creative Cities Network in the gastronomy category. The designation did not just celebrate what was already there; it helped organize what came next. Restaurants opened. Food tours developed. Young cooks returned to the ancestral recipes their grandmothers had carried through the earthquake. Gastronomy, the local government declared, had become the city's main post-disaster cultural industry, a source of employment and pride.

The city has other layers. The Jardin Botanico de Portoviejo sprawls across 50 hectares in the northeast, owned by the Technical University of Manabi and home to orchid gardens, a palmetum, and a plant rescue area that serves as both refuge and classroom. The Parque Arqueologico Cerro Jaboncillo preserves the remains of the pre-Columbian Manteño culture just outside town, stone chairs and platforms built by a civilization that flourished before Spanish arrival. In the village of Sosote, workshops carve tagua, the so-called vegetable ivory made from palm seeds, into jewelry and small sculptures that support a quiet local economy. The Technical University of Manabi, founded in 1952, brings students into town from across the province. Portoviejo the poet city produced Vicente Amador Flor, whose verses about the place gave his name to the central park that now anchors the rebuilt downtown.