Rosalía Suárez and the Copper Bowl: How Paila Helado Became a Business

On one block of Calle Oviedo, near its corner with Olmedo in central Ibarra, two ice-cream parlours carry the same name: Rosalía Suárez. That block is the sixth stop of the White City walk, and the two counters are the story in miniature.

What helado de paila is

Paila means a wide, shallow pan, traditionally bronze or copper. To make helado de paila, the maker sets the pan in a tub of ice, coarse salt and straw, pours in fruit juice and sugar, and spins the pan while scraping and stirring with a wooden spoon until the mixture freezes. There is no machine. The salt drives the ice below freezing, the metal carries the cold into the juice, and the scraping keeps the crystals moving until the whole pan is a bright, fruity ice.

The classic flavours are fruit: mora, the Andean blackberry, naranjilla, guanábana and others. Some parlours also make flavours with milk, coconut with milk among them, so do not assume every scoop is dairy-free.

The pan itself has rules. A new paila must be virgin, never used for cooking, and the makers cure it with three days of boiling and then a wash with ash and sour orange, El Telégrafo reported in 2018.

Who Rosalía Suárez was

Rosalía Suárez is credited with starting helado de paila in Ibarra in the 1890s. Her family and most press accounts give 1896, and some guidebooks say 1897. Beyond that, the popular version of her story runs ahead of the sources. We found no source for the often-told details that she started at fifteen or carried the pan to market on her head, and the claims that the technique is pre-Hispanic, or that its ice was cut by professional ice carriers from glaciers above 4,000 metres, are not documented either.

What the family does say is this. Before there were ice factories, the ice came down from the Imbabura volcano. Today it is machine-made: in 2020 the parlour said it used about five quintals of ice a day.

Two counters, one street

By the family's own account, the first parlour was at the corner of Flores and Sucre, where a branch of Banco Pichincha stands today. The business then spent sixty-three years in an old building at Oviedo and Olmedo. In a 2020 interview with the Ibarra paper Expectativa, her great-grandson Tiberio Vásquez said the family moved to a modern four-storey building in 1996 and an uncle opened his own parlour opposite. That is why two parlours carry her name on the same block. Vásquez dates the shop's fame to the early 1970s, when new roads cut the trip from Quito to four hours and then two.

Other descendants run their own ice-cream businesses, in Ibarra and beyond, and family members count the generations differently, so treat any single "fifth generation" claim as one branch's count.

Ordering

Order by fruit, and watch a pan if one is spinning: the change from juice to ice happens in front of you. Mora is the one most people start with. Which side of Oviedo is the older building, and whether both counters are open on a given day, is worth checking when you get there.

The bowl in your hand is not an ancient artefact. It is something better documented and just as good: one family's recipe, kept going for well over a century and now sold from two counters facing each other across one street.