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While visiting the home of Oswaldo Guayasamín, now an outstanding museum dedicated to his life and work as one of Ecuador’s most esteemed 20th-century artists, I am struck by a painting of Quito’s cityscape. Guayasamín painted the view from his neighborhood of Bellavista dozens of times, and here the patchwork of houses stretching between the five majestic volcanoes that surround the city are steeped in shades of dazzling blue and green, an ode to the otherworldly light of this high-altitude capital. But what strikes me is how different it looks from the city I am standing in today.
In the 20 or so years since his death, the population of Quito has doubled—and that patchwork of houses has spread up hillsides and down ravines to accommodate it. The biggest change is in the skyline. In 2015, the airport, which long hindered development, was relocated out of the city center, allowing for the construction of buildings higher than 15 stories for the first time in the city’s history. This ushered in a new era of design potential, attracting architects like Philippe Starck, Moshe Safdie, and Bjarke Ingels, the latter whose tree-lined 33-story brutalist IQON, a mix of apartments and commercial spaces, became the city’s tallest building upon completion in December 2022.
At 9,350 feet above sea level and hemmed on all sides by the Andes, Quito’s setting is spectacular, but it's often overlooked by international visitors thanks to poor infrastructure and poor messaging. Those who do stopover—usually as an embarkation point for cruises through the Galápagos Islands—rarely venture beyond the Old Town, visiting the Baroque churches and 16th-century plazas that earned it UNESCO World Heritage status in 1978. This spate of glossy new towers represents a transformation underway in the city, spanning everything from culture to cuisine—and one that can be seen in the new neighborhood hubs that have emerged, fueled by local entrepreneurship and creative community, offering visitors like me another side of the city to explore.
Joseph and Tommy Schwarzkopf of the father-and-son Ecuadorian development company Uribe Schwarzkopf are part of this transformation, responsible for inviting much of the architectural talent to town. They have a vision of positioning Quito as a world class city to rival São Paulo or Medellín, enticing tourists, retirees, and expats to fuel the economy (and live in their buildings). “If we’re going to put Quito on the map, we have to do beautiful architecture,” Joseph tells me, over coca leaf tea for my altitude sickness, at their office in La Carolina, one of the areas in the midst of rapid change—and the location for many of their projects, IQON included.
La Carolina’s evolution is largely thanks to its proximity to one of the 15 stops of the Quito metro, which opened in a limited capacity in March after years of delays (it’s expected to be fully up-and-running in December 2023). A wildly ambitious public works project, stations were constructed beneath the 400-year-old city, with each cobblestone of the historic Plaza San Francisco painstakingly lifted and labeled to be returned to its original setting. During the process, they discovered a muddle of pre-Hispanic and Colonial ceramics, as well as some chambers and staircases; artifacts of interest will be displayed in a small museum at the San Francisco station. Once regular service picks up, it will reduce congestion and pollution, improving the lives of many Quiteños and opening up the city to visitors. Traveling from the Old Town to La Carolina previously took up to an hour with traffic; on the metro, it takes seven minutes.
I stroll around a fraction of La Carolina’s namesake 165-acre park, which was marshland less than a century ago, passing its peaceful botanic gardens, lake dotted with pedal boats, and many food stalls selling ceviche and llapingachos (Ecuadorian potato patties stuffed with cheese). Five luxury apartment blocks have shot up on its perimeter in the past five years, and while the changes follow the familiar roadmap of gentrification—avocado toast, fancy coffee shops, and co-working spaces—what’s unique to Quito is that this high-rise living and its connected sense of globalism is new.
“The culture is changing for the youth, in particular,” says Rómulo Moya Peralta, an architect and the general director of multidisciplinary design center Trama. “Their parents used to live in a big house and now they want to live in an urban space in an apartment. Neighborhoods are full of bars, coffeeshops, restaurants—it’s a new way of life. Twenty years ago, we didn’t go out for coffee; it’s a small example of a big impact.”
While La Carolina and the leafy suburb of Cumbayá are where many affluent Quiteños live and play, La Floresta is where the creative community convenes. Its colorful streets are lined with purple-flowered jacaranda trees, murals, and mid-century villas. Ocho y Media, an independent cinema and cafe-bar, has been the de facto cultural headquarters of the neighborhood for the past two decades. In that time its founder Mariana Andrade experienced some resistance from more conservative-minded neighbors who feared the change her venue represented. “Yes, we need to keep the traditional Andean way of living,” she explains, “but we must also look toward the future.”
That future involves entrepreneurs like Estefanía Cardona. Her concept store, Casa Kiki, is a few blocks away from Ocho y Media, down a cobbled street in a little heritage house. It stocks a highly curated collection of clothes, jewelry, books, and art, but it also functions as a gallery and event space. The offshoot of a lifestyle blog, the store, which opened in April 2021, continues Cardona’s project of sharing stories of Ecuadorian designers as a way of “changing the culture of how we consume,” she says. “We’re not here to get you a size or tell you the price, though we do that too, but to tell you the story.”
Cardona walks me around the all-white space, talking knowledgeably about each designer, like Hera, which uses natural materials and dyes or up-cycled textiles in its brilliantly bright unisex garments, or Kayamamas (previously known as Allpamamas), an all-women brand working with Indigenous artisans to create breezy natural designs using ancestral techniques. Cardona credits the advent of social media for the recent boom in young design talent in Ecuador as it provided an outlet to sell and market work independently. Previously, she says, it was “easier to fall in love with a designer from another country than appreciate the artisans from our own.” Casa Kiki fosters this appreciation, while also creating a space for the community that shares it. As I leave, I’m invited to a book talk that evening from the country’s leading transgender activist.
This collaborative approach between contemporary designers and the country’s rich Indigenous artisanal history was widely popularized by the Olga Anhalzer Fisch, the late Hungarian Bauhaus artist who arrived in Quito by boat after fleeing World War II. Fisch was inspired by the work she encountered while traveling through Ecuador, and it became her mission to support and preserve Indigenous art through her gallery and shop, now the flagship Olga Fisch Folklore store in La Floresta (it still has a secret gem of a museum upstairs). Those traditions influenced her own textile work, too—she found fame when the director of New York’s MoMA discovered her rugs—and to this day, the label works with local artists and artisans to create its designs.
Margara Anhalzer, Fisch’s grand-niece, a distinguished designer herself and now president of what has grown into an international brand, says young Ecuadorian designers are now returning to their roots. “People realized it’s important to tell these stories,” she tells me, stopping to show me a shigra (a bag handwoven from natural fibers) comprising the work of Indigenous groups in the Otavalo and Cotopaxi areas. “You see how much talent there is here?" says Anhalzer. "That is the wealth of this country.”
This celebration of the uniquely Ecuadorian carries through to culinary culture. At the bustling and bright Somos in La Carolina, which opened in 2020, chef-owner Alejandra Espinoza creates wildly inventive dishes under the motto “Ecuadoran born, globally inspired.” The most memorable? The chontacuro, an Amazonian grub around the size of a thumb, grilled to perfection and served with a palette-cleansing bouquet of herbs. “Hold the head and eat it in one bite,” the server tells me. Its crisp delicate skin gives way to a gooey interior, which tastes earthy and vaguely of pork. At Foresta, which opened in 2022 in La Floresta, chef Rodrigo Pacheco grows many of the ingredients for the hyper-seasonal tasting menus in his rewilded food forest in Pillagua, demonstrating the country’s immense biodiversity.
Both restaurants have staggering interior design. While Somos is defined by its bright wraparound mural from Ecuadorian artist Apitatán, the indoor-outdoor Foresta is a minimalist greenhouse with looming volcanic-rock structures that double as cooking surfaces. The latter is envisioned by rising star architect Felipe Escudero, who worked in London, Beijing, and New York, before returning to Quito (like many of the young creatives I spoke with) where he’s helping to put the city on the global design map. Here, he says, he was able to take on projects of a grander scale and execute them faster than he could elsewhere in the world with less restrictions to navigate. Over dinner, he shows me his designs for the yet-to-open Quito Contemporary Arts Centre—a futuristic white cube placed within a collapsed historic house in La Floresta.
New openings like these represent a rarified experience not shared by the vast majority of Quiteños. The city faces many hurdles from political corruption and poor urban planning to unemployment, and a lack of basic sanitation and electricity in the “informal” housing that fills much of the city. Many Quiteños live in the south, where poverty and crime are concentrated, and face hours-long commutes to the north for work. But despite these hurdles, there is a sense of possibility, too.
This is the basis for the work of Impaqto led by Michelle Arevalo-Carpenter, Daniela Peralvo, and Caroline Brita. Founded in 2014, it began as a co-working popup and has expanded to four locations around the city, including, most recently, in a factory-turned-jazz club, El Pobre Diablo, which also houses Foresta, as well as socially-conscious coffee roaster Cabra Negra and contemporary gallery N24. But Impaqto’s accelerator program is what is fueling change; it supports startups with a social or environmental drive, and has received more than $10 million in investment. It has launched 292 startups to date, assisting Cardona’s Casa Kiki and fashion label Kayamamas.
Environmentally conscious innovation meets tourism in the 12-room Hotel Carlota in the Old Town, the first LEED-certified hotel in the country. Its rooftop bar is a coveted spot for a sundowner with views over the glistening Moorish domes and gothic basilicas. The husband-and-wife owners, Renato Solines and Veronica Reed, renovated the turn-of-the-century house formerly belonging to Solines’ grandmother, Carlota. Founders of VIVA Arquitectura, an environmental design and research studio, they’re passionate advocates for sustainability, recovering 90 percent of the original building in the renovation and implementing solar energy and a water-conservation system. They focus on luxury travelers—as with their newly opened second property on the coast in Manta—because they have the means to engage with sustainability, which they see as vital to the future of tourism in Ecuador. “Tourism is how we can share the richness of this country while having a positive impact on the communities here,” says Reed.
I spend my final morning sunning myself in the pretty Plaza San Marcos and within the hour, I’m sheltering from the torrential rain. A local tells me not to worry: “Quito passes through four seasons in a day.” Much like the weather, the sense of change here is palpable; this city is constantly shifting, sometimes quite literally thanks to seismic activity. And yet there remains a steadiness in its traditions, too. Situated on the equator, the sun sets reliably at 6:30 p.m. each day, all year long.
