The geography here is liquid. The Babahoyo and the Daule run down from the Andes and the interior, converging just upstream of Guayaquil to become the Guayas - the river that flows past Ecuador's largest city and into the Gulf of Guayaquil. Samborondón occupies the peninsula where that convergence happens, and La Puntilla - the 'little point' at the peninsula's tip - is the neighborhood that everyone actually means when they say Samborondón. Cross one bridge and you are in Guayaquil proper. The commute is short enough that La Puntilla functions as a bedroom community for the city's professional class, though calling it a bedroom community undersells the scale.

La Puntilla is a landscape of urbanizaciones cerradas - gated communities where guards check cars at entrance booths and private roads wind between palm-lined homes. The Friedrich Ebert Foundation has published studies on what Samborondón represents: a new kind of city shaped by concerns about security, built deliberately separate from the public fabric of Guayaquil. The shopping centers reflect the same logic. Riocentro Entrerios has stores, a hypermarket, a food court, a cinema. The Village Plaza, inaugurated in August 2010, houses a Supermaxi hypermarket and more than ninety stores. Plaza Lagos, Bocca, La Piazza, La Torre, Las Terrazas, Alhambra, Plaza Navona - the names alone sketch the aspirations, a parade of European-coded brand identities in a tropical Ecuadorian suburb.

As the wealth moved east, the schools followed. Colegio Menor, Abdon Calderon, Torremar and Delta (associated with Opus Dei), Nuevo Mundo, Liceo Panamericano, Monte Tabor - most of Guayaquil's elite private schools opened branches or relocated to Samborondón. The German School Guayaquil inaugurated a second kindergarten here on April 13, 2009. Twenty-three public elementary schools also serve the canton. The first university came in 1994, when the Universidad de Especialidades Espiritu Santo opened its doors. Ecotec followed. ESPOL, the Technical University of the Littoral, runs a smaller annex called PROTCOM that offers a limited set of associate degrees. The effect is a kind of educational gravitational pull - if you live in Guayaquil and can afford the choice, your children probably cross the bridge every morning to study.

Samborondón itself is older than the suburbs that now define it. The town was founded on May 24, 1776, and achieved independence on October 10, 1822. Since October 31, 1955 it has been a canton. But the Samborondón most visitors see is Parque Historico, a combined botanical garden, zoological park of local fauna, and open-air museum with reconstructions of historical buildings. It is one of the main tourist attractions in the Guayaquil metropolitan area, a place designed to remind residents of a coastal Ecuadorian past that the gated communities around it tend to abstract away. Guides lead school groups past replicas of nineteenth-century river-town architecture while capybaras and sloths watch from their enclosures.

Saint Brendan, meanwhile, has had an unusually durable second life in Spanish folklore. San Borondón, in Canary Islands tradition, is a phantom island that appears and disappears in the Atlantic - sometimes glimpsed from Tenerife or La Palma, never successfully landed on. Sailors have reported it for centuries. It shows up on old maps, placed somewhere west of the Canaries, then quietly removed when no one could find it again. The Ecuadorian town bears no such mystery. It is firmly attached to the peninsula where the Babahoyo and Daule meet. But the name carries a faint residue of that older story - the medieval Irish monk, the vanishing island, the westward voyage toward a paradise just out of reach.