Guayllabamba

This is Guayllabamba, a small town northeast of Quito. I took the photo from the terrace of my brother-in-law Vicente's house. This view is roughly southwest, or back towards Quito. You can see the steeple of the Guayllabamba church in the background, a little to the right of center, in line with a small hill. The church overlooks the town plaza.

The terrain around Guayllabamba is arid, as are a number of small towns just north and east of Quito. A river runs through town and is used to irrigate the many fruit trees that people have planted. Guayllabamba is known for production of chirimoyas, which are a fruit with green leafy scales on the outside and white meat with intermittent very hard seeds on the inside. Chirimoyas are very tasty. They are also known for worms. My Ecuadorian friends always teased me that I was going to find a worm someday in a chirimoya, but I haven't yet.

Guayllabamba has a zoo, which I went to once (more than a decade ago), and thought was pretty good. It is the biggest zoo anywhere close to Quito, and taking the bus out from Quito to the Guayllabamba zoo is a popular day trip.

You can see in this photo how Guayllabamba is broken up into very regular blocks. There is one block, just out of sight on the left side of the photo, that has always fascinated me. It has beautiful trees planted everywhere, but you can only see their crowns; the walls are too high all the way around the block to look at the grounds. It is a secret garden that I hope to get inside the walls to see one day.