Discover Oriente & Amazon

The Oriente is everything east of the Andes in Ecuador — roughly half the country’s land area, holding a small fraction of its people — and it is the headwaters of the Amazon. Rivers that start as meltwater on volcanoes above five thousand metres are navigable jungle waterways within a day’s drive, which is why the descent from Quito is one of the more dramatic road journeys in South America.

Yasuní national park, where the Andes, the Amazon and the equator intersect, is among the most biodiverse places measured anywhere on earth: a single hectare there can hold more tree species than the United States and Canada combined. Cuyabeno, further north, is a flooded forest reserve of black-water lagoons, pink river dolphins and caiman. Both are reached by river from Coca or Lago Agrio; Tena and Misahuallí on the Napo are the easier, closer alternatives.

The region is Indigenous territory — Kichwa, Shuar, Achuar, Waorani and others — and community-run lodges have become the standard way to visit, which puts the money where it belongs. It is also Ecuador’s oil province, and the tension between the two has been the country’s central environmental argument for fifty years; in a national referendum in 2023 Ecuadorians voted to leave the crude under one of Yasuní’s blocks in the ground. It rains all year, with the heaviest months from April to July.