Quito Above the Clouds

Republic, ritual, and volcano country in the Ecuadorian highlands

Six places in the world's highest official capital, 2,850 meters up in an Andean valley ringed by volcanoes: the first UNESCO World Heritage city and largest colonial center in the Americas, the Plaza Grande that began as a watering hole and now holds the First Cry of Independence, the presidential palace Bolivar named and a later century quietly looted, the Jesuit church sheathed in 23-carat gold, the three-hour battle on Pichincha's slopes that freed Ecuador in 1822, and the equator monument standing 240 meters off the line the locals had marked centuries earlier.

Itinerary

1. Quito — Quito straddles the equator at 2,850 meters -- the highest official capital in the world -- yet stays spring-cool, ringed by volcanoes whose snow shows on clear days. The Spanish founded it in 1534 over an Inca city built over older settlements, and in 1978 its 320-hectare colonial center, the largest and best-preserved in the Americas, became one of the first UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
2. Plaza de la Independencia — Quito's central square began as packed dirt around a water source, useful to neighbors fetching water. Only in 1612 did it become the Plaza Grande -- the big one. On August 10, 1809, Creoles meeting a block away declared the overthrow of the Spanish Royal Audience; the uprising failed in days and its leaders were executed, but the date became the First Cry of Independence, finally marked by a French monument unveiled here in 1906.
3. Palacio de Carondelet — When Simon Bolivar walked into this palace in 1822, its elegance and austerity stopped him, and he gave it the name of the baron who had renovated it -- Carondelet, a former governor of Spanish Louisiana. Nearly every Ecuadorian head of state since has worked here. But an archaeologist's audit found the original 19th-century bronze fittings quietly replaced with copies of gold-sprayed lead; the originals are gone, and the looting investigation continues.
4. Church of La Compania, Quito — A traveling Jesuit called it the Golden Ember. Inside this church, a block south of the cathedral, every surface -- altarpieces, pillars, vaults -- is sheathed in 23-carat gold leaf over carved cedar, glowing against deep red. The main altarpiece alone took twenty years: ten to carve, ten for master Bernardo de Legarda to gild. The whole church took 160 years and four architectural styles to finish.
5. Battle of Pichincha — On May 24, 1822, the 27-year-old general Sucre fought a three-hour battle at 3,500 meters on Pichincha's slopes, his exhausted, altitude-sick troops a multinational coalition of Colombians, Peruvians, Argentines, and 433 Scottish, Irish, and English volunteers of the Albion Battalion. When the Spanish sprang their best unit on the patriot rear, the Albion had improbably climbed even higher -- and the charge that won Ecuador's freedom came from above.
6. Ciudad Mitad del Mundo — The yellow line painted across this plaza is in the wrong place -- 240 meters off. It marks where an 18th-century French expedition calculated the equator while proving the Earth is flattened at the poles, exactly as Newton predicted. They got the planet's shape right and the line slightly wrong, and missed that the nearby Quitu-Cara ruins of Catequilla sit almost exactly on the true equator, measured centuries earlier without European instruments.