Paila, Nogadas and Arrope: The Sweet Side of Ibarra's White City Walk

Ibarra had a food walk of its own, the Sweet Trail. It has been folded into the White City walk, which now carries the town's sweets along its route: the paila ice-cream counters on Calle Oviedo at the sixth stop, nogadas and arrope de mora around La Merced at the seventh, and Calle Olmedo, long known for its sweets, at the ninth. This piece is the longer version of that thread.

An earlier version of this article argued that Ibarra's sweets are Caranqui techniques under colonial sugar. The sources do not support that, so this version sticks to what can be traced.

The paila

Helado de paila is fruit juice and sugar beaten by hand in a bronze or copper pan, the paila, which is spun in a tub of ice, coarse salt and straw and scraped with a wooden spoon until the mixture freezes. There is no machine. Rosalía Suárez is credited with starting it in Ibarra in the 1890s, and her family and most press accounts give 1896. Before ice factories, the family says, the ice was brought down from the Imbabura volcano. No source we found shows that the technique is pre-Hispanic or that it relied on professional ice carriers cutting glacier ice above 4,000 metres, so this article does not repeat those claims.

Today two parlours carry Rosalía Suárez's name on the same block of Oviedo, the result of a family move in 1996 and an uncle's parlour opened opposite. The story is told in full in Rosalía Suárez and the copper bowl.

The nogada

Nogadas are walnut sweets. A maker interviewed by El Telégrafo in 2015 said every house used to have a walnut tree, the nogal that gives the sweet its name, and that the walnuts were cooked with panela or sugar in bronze pans. Nogadas were once called el dulce de las casas grandes, the sweet of the big houses, the dessert of the haciendas.

The arrope

Arrope de mora is a blackberry syrup. The same maker was firm that it is a liquid, not a jam and not a jelly, that it keeps for a year, and that it came to Ibarra from Otavalo. Sellers of nogadas and arrope have long worked on Calle Olmedo, diagonal to the park of La Merced, and around the central parks.

How to use the walk

The White City walk is ten stops and about 1.8 kilometres, roughly an hour and a quarter, and the sweets sit along it rather than on a separate route. Bring small bills, stop for a paila ice at the sixth stop, and pick up nogadas or a bottle of arrope near La Merced or on Calle Olmedo. Then read the rest of the walk for what it is: a town rebuilt after the earthquake of 1868, whose sweets are part of the streets it came back to.