Santiago sits on what Ecuadorians call the Route of the Saints - a cluster of nearby towns founded by Spanish conquistadors more than five centuries ago, each named for a Christian saint: San Lorenzo, San Simon, San Vicente, San Jose de Chimbo, and Santiago itself, the Spanish form of Saint James. Driving the route takes you through rolling Andean agricultural country, past adobe houses, whitewashed churches, terraced fields climbing the hillsides, and small plazas where elderly men sit on benches in the afternoon. The Spanish founded these towns along major communication routes of the old indigenous road network. The roads are paved now, in good condition, and the forty-minute drive between Santiago and Guaranda is one of the pleasant ones in this part of the country.

One of the best things a visitor can do in Santiago is learn to make bread with a local family using a traditional wood-burning oven. The ovens here, built of adobe, hold heat for hours after the fire is out. Local women shape tortillas de maiz and tortillas de trigo - corn and wheat flatbreads, specifically - slide them onto the hot stone floor, and pull them out minutes later smelling of smoke and flour. The cooking is the kind that becomes invisible when it is done every day. For a visitor, participating in the routine turns the morning into something you will remember. Pork is another local specialty, prepared simply. Local coffee, brewed strong, goes with everything.

Santiago has two big festivals each year. Carnival falls in February, a traditional parade that sweeps through the whole region - drums, masks, music, water fights that start as play and escalate throughout the afternoon. Families come home from wherever they have moved, and the town doubles or triples in population for a few days. In July, the town celebrates the Festival of Senor de la Salud - Lord of Health - with multiple days of religious processions and secular festivities, organized by Santiago residents and those who have returned from across the country. The combination of Catholic piety and public celebration follows a pattern familiar anywhere in the Andes. The religion gets folded into the civic calendar, the saint becomes a reason for the town to gather.

Twenty minutes from Santiago by car, along a dirt road, lies the Cashca Totoras Protected Forest and Reserve. This is one of the last stands of medium-altitude endemic Andean forest, a remnant of the subtropical high-altitude ecosystem that once covered this region more broadly. The biodiversity here is unique and largely unstudied - plants and animals adapted to the specific thermal regime of cloud forest at intermediate elevation. The forest is threatened by logging. Projects to protect it have engaged the local community through community-based tourism initiatives, trying to make conservation economically viable by giving visitors a reason to pay for guided walks through the remaining canopy. The landscape between Santiago and the reserve is striking on the drive, layered ridges and valleys descending toward coastal Ecuador to the west.

The main church in Santiago holds religious art worth seeing. Outside town, water mills turn on the banks of the Santiago River - working mills, not museum pieces, still grinding grain for local families. Above town, a hill called La Loma offers photography angles and long views across the Andean fields. And somewhere in Santiago, the painter Ivo Mora maintains a studio and gallery; asking around town will usually turn up directions. His work is locally famous, not internationally known, which is fitting for a place this size. The pace of Santiago is slow by design. Pickup trucks from the main plaza will take visitors anywhere for a negotiated price. Horses can be hired by asking at the square. Hitchhiking is easy - the locals tend to be friendly about stopping. None of these arrangements are scheduled. They happen when they happen, and that is the point.