The Other Quito: How La Mariscal and La Floresta Became Ecuador's Bohemia

The first time most travellers come to Quito they see the colonial historic centre, photograph the gold inside La Compañía, climb the Panecillo, and leave thinking they have seen the city. They have seen about a third of it. The colonial centre is roughly 320 hectares, and the part of Quito that does most of the cultural work today, the part with the cafés and the galleries and the cinemas and the artists' studios, is twenty blocks north of Plaza Grande and was almost entirely empty land within living memory.

That second Quito has two adjacent names. La Mariscal, the larger of the two, is the grid roughly bounded by Parque El Ejido in the south, Avenida Patria in the south-west, Avenida Eloy Alfaro in the north, and Avenida 12 de Octubre in the east. It was developed in waves from the 1920s through the 1960s as an upper-middle-class residential neighbourhood. La Floresta sits immediately east of La Mariscal, smaller, lower, more wooded, with narrow streets that follow the contour rather than the grid. It was a railway-worker neighbourhood until the 1960s, then a residential quarter, then, from the 1990s, an artists' quarter. The tour walks both, because the boundary between them is porous and the cultural story braids across it.

What happened between 1972 and 1992

The frame the tour uses is the two decades when the Quito that came after the colonial city was made. In 1972 Ecuador struck oil in the Amazon, and the country went, in less than ten years, from being one of the poorest in South America to being a member of OPEC. Quito received most of the federal money. New ministries needed offices. New civil servants needed houses. Galleries opened. Universities expanded. The Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, which sits on the western edge of La Floresta, grew into a major institution. By the early 1990s, the neighbourhood had cafés, a film cooperative, three galleries, and a generation of artists who could not afford to live in a colonial centre that was already on its way to becoming a UNESCO-managed tourist district.

The 1978 UNESCO inscription of the historic centre matters here in a way that is rarely spelled out. The inscription created an enormous regulatory and financial apparatus around the colonial city. It also pushed the city's creative economy, almost without anyone deciding it, twenty blocks north. The colonial centre got the World Heritage plaque. La Mariscal and La Floresta got the artists.

The stops, read against that story

The tour begins at Parque El Ejido, on the southern boundary of La Mariscal, because the park is the city's clearest geographic seam: the colonial centre ends at its southern edge, the modern city begins at its northern edge. Casa de la Cultura, the second stop, is an institutional anchor: the building was finished in 1974, financed partly by oil revenue, and it houses a national museum, a symphony hall, and the Cinemateca Nacional that has been Ecuador's main film archive for fifty years. Mercado Artesanal, in the centre of La Mariscal, is the contradiction the tour notes: a craft market sized for North American tourists, selling alpaca sweaters and Otavalan textiles to people on layover. Plaza Foch, two blocks north, is the after-dark centre of La Mariscal: bars, hostels, late-night food. It is loud and slightly battered, and it is where most travellers who pass through Quito's nightlife pass through.

The next three stops cross into La Floresta. Kallari, on Reina Victoria, is a chocolate cooperative founded in 2002 that buys cacao directly from Kichwa producers in the Napo province of the Amazon. It is small, the building is restored, and the chocolate is among the best in the country. Parque La Floresta is the quarter's geographic centre: a wedge-shaped park surrounded by cafés, an independent bookshop, and the kind of repurposed early-twentieth-century houses that make the neighbourhood feel European. Ocho y Medio, two blocks east, is the indie cinema that has anchored La Floresta's film culture since 2001. It was named after Federico Fellini's film, and its programming sets the tone of the quarter: a mix of Latin American independent cinema, European arthouse, and Ecuadorian documentaries.

The resolution: Guayasamín

The tour ends at the Fundación Guayasamín, which sits up the slope of the Bellavista hill in the neighbourhood of Batán Alto, about a kilometre north-east of La Floresta. Oswaldo Guayasamín, who died in 1999, was the dominant figure in twentieth-century Ecuadorian painting. He was born in 1919 in central Quito, trained at the School of Fine Arts, and spent the second half of his life painting indigenous and Latin American suffering in a stylized, angular figurative language that was politically committed and visually unmistakable. The foundation he created on the Bellavista hill is two buildings: his former home and studio, and the Capilla del Hombre, finished posthumously in 2002, a memorial to Latin America's twentieth-century history of dictatorship, displacement, and resistance.

Why does the tour end here? Because the foundation is the institutional climax of the bohemian Quito the rest of the tour walks through. The artists' quarter that grew up between 1972 and 1992 did not produce a hundred Guayasamíns. But the conditions that let him build a foundation on a hill above the city, that let his work become the country's defining post-colonial art, were the same conditions that made La Floresta possible: oil money, universities, civic confidence, and the slow drift of cultural energy away from the colonial centre.

By the time you stand on the foundation's terrace and look back across the city, the colonial Quito of the historic centre tour is visible to the south, the modern Quito of glass apartment blocks to the north, and the bohemian quarter you have just walked is the seam between them. That is the Quito most travellers never see.