The Most Beautiful Places in Ecuador
10 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Ecuador are Cotopaxi, Chimborazo and Quilotoa. The list covers 10 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Ecuador packs extraordinary contrasts into a small country. The equator crosses the Andes here, where two parallel volcanic ranges line a high central valley that Alexander von Humboldt's travels made famous as the Avenue of the Volcanoes. Snow-capped cones stand almost on the equator, collapsed craters hold lakes, the rivers descend steeply toward the Amazon, and a thousand kilometres offshore a volcanic hotspot built the Galápagos Islands.
Chimborazo is the highest mountain in the country, and because of the Earth's equatorial bulge its summit is the point on the surface farthest from the planet's centre. Cotopaxi, one of the highest active volcanoes in the world, wears a glacier on an almost perfect cone. Quilotoa holds a green lake inside a caldera left by a great eruption, and Cuicocha, at the foot of Cotacachi, has wooded islands rising from its crater.
The Galápagos are another world: Darwin's visit in 1835 helped shape his ideas on evolution, and the islands were among the first places inscribed on the World Heritage List. On Bartolomé, Pinnacle Rock rises beside a bay framed by fresh lava, and off San Cristóbal, Kicker Rock splits into two sheer walls in open sea. On the mainland, the Jesuit church of La Compañía in Quito glows with gilded carving, the railway at the Devil's Nose zigzags down a cliff face, and the Pailón del Diablo waterfall near Baños thunders into a narrow gorge on its way to the Amazon.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cotopaxi | Volcano | |
| 2 | Chimborazo | Volcano | |
| 3 | Quilotoa | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 4 | Galápagos National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 5 | Bartolomé Island | Island | ✓ |
| 6 | Kicker Rock (León Dormido) | Stack | |
| 7 | Cuicocha | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 8 | La Compañía de Jesús, Quito | Church building | |
| 9 | Nariz del Diablo (Devil's Nose) | Rock formation | |
| 10 | Pailón del Diablo | Waterfall |
01 Cotopaxi
Volcán Cotopaxi
Ecuador · 33.5 km from Latacunga0.681° S 78.438° W
Image by tvtommyec from Pixabay Cotopaxi is the volcano children would draw: a nearly symmetrical cone rising alone from a high Andean plain at about 3,800 m to 5,897 m, capped with one of the few glaciers on the equator. It stands in Cotopaxi National Park about 50 km south of Quito and is the second-highest summit in Ecuador after Chimborazo.
Did you know? The greatest danger is meltwater rather than lava: a sudden melt of the summit glacier could send mudflows down the valleys towards Quito's southern suburbs.
02 Chimborazo
Volcán Chimborazo
Ecuador · 26.5 km from Guaranda1.469° S 78.817° W
Dabit100 / David Torres Costales Riobamba · CC BY-SA 3.0 Chimborazo is Ecuador's highest mountain, an ice-capped stratovolcano of 6,263 metres in the western range of the Andes, and it holds a record no Himalayan peak can match.
Did you know? The French Geodesic Mission worked on the mountain in the 1740s while trying to determine the true shape of the Earth.
03 Quilotoa
Ecuador · 32.9 km from Latacunga0.861° S 78.897° W
Image by Marisa04 from Pixabay From the rim of Quilotoa the ground simply falls away. Below lies a round lake about 3 km across, filling the crater of a volcano in Ecuador's central highlands, its surface a startling green that shifts towards turquoise or deep teal with the light and the clouds.
Did you know? One phase of the 1280 eruption was driven by magma meeting water, suggesting a crater lake already existed when it began.
04 Galápagos National Park
Parque nacional Galápagos
Ecuador0.333° S 90.000° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Jonathan Green · CC BY 4.0 Galápagos National Park covers about 97 percent of the land of the Galápagos archipelago, a scatter of more than a hundred volcanic islands, islets and rocks straddling the equator some 900 km west of mainland Ecuador. Only the settled corners of Santa Cruz, San Cristóbal, Isabela and Baltra lie outside it.
Did you know? Between 1997 and 2006, Project Isabela removed more than 140,000 feral goats from Isabela, Santiago and Pinta to save native vegetation.
05 Bartolomé Island
Ecuador · 35.3 km from Santa Cruz0.285° S 90.549° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Stephen Montgomery from Kallangur, Australia · CC BY-SA 2.0 Bartolomé Island is the image many people carry of the Galápagos: a small, bare volcanic island of red, orange and black cinder, with a crescent of pale sand on either side of a narrow isthmus and, at the edge of the water, the jagged spire of Pinnacle Rock.
Did you know? The lava cactus, one of the smallest cacti in the archipelago, is among the few pioneer plants able to root in Bartolomé's bare lava.
06 Kicker Rock (León Dormido)
Roca León Dormido
Ecuador · 16.3 km from Puerto Baquerizo Moreno0.777° S 89.519° W
Xxchangwoo0120xx · CC BY-SA 3.0 León Dormido — "sleeping lion" — is a pair of sheer rock walls rising straight out of the Pacific off the coast of San Cristóbal Island in the Galápagos.
Did you know? Tuff cones form when rising magma meets seawater: the steam explosions shatter the lava into ash, which settles and slowly hardens into rock.
07 Cuicocha
Ecuador · 26.7 km from Ibarra0.301° N 78.363° W
Tequendamia · CC BY-SA 3.0 Cuicocha is a caldera lake about three kilometres across, sunk into the foot of Cotacachi volcano in the northern Andes of Ecuador. Its water fills a basin up to 200 metres deep, and from the rim, at 3,246 metres above sea level, two forested islands rise out of the middle like the backs of sleeping animals.
Did you know? The larger island honours Theodor Wolf, the German scientist who studied Ecuador's geology and volcanoes in the nineteenth century.
08 La Compañía de Jesús, Quito
Iglesia de la Compañía
Ecuador · 1.6 km from Quito0.221° S 78.514° W
Ranoutofusername · CC BY-SA 4.0 La Compañía de Jesús is the church that Quito shows when it wants to show off.
Did you know? The main altarpiece was designed by a German Jesuit, Jorge Vinterer, before Bernardo de Legarda spent about ten years gilding it.
09 Nariz del Diablo (Devil's Nose)
Nariz del Diablo
Ecuador · 6.6 km from Alausí2.243° S 78.877° W
Carine06 · CC BY-SA 2.0 In the Andes of central Ecuador, a sheer rock spur about 100 metres high juts out over the gorge of the Chanchán river, and a railway climbs straight up its face.
Did you know? The line was pushed through by President Eloy Alfaro, who in 1897 signed a contract with the American financier Archer Harman to finish the railway.
10 Pailón del Diablo
Cascada el Pailón del Diablo
Ecuador · 35.6 km from Puyo1.404° S 78.297° W
Krosto · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Pailón del Diablo, the "Devil's Cauldron", is the waterfall of the Río Verde as it throws itself towards the Pastaza River in Ecuador's Tungurahua province, beside the road that runs east from Baños towards Puyo.
Did you know? Stairways hewn into the cliff lead to a narrow passage where visitors can stand behind the falling curtain of water.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Ecuador?
- On our list, Cotopaxi ranks first, followed by Chimborazo and Quilotoa.
- Why is Chimborazo's summit the farthest point from Earth's centre?
- The Earth bulges at the equator, and Chimborazo stands just south of it. Although Everest is far higher above sea level, Chimborazo's summit is about two kilometres farther from the centre of the planet.
- What is the Avenue of the Volcanoes?
- It is the name given to the central valley of the Ecuadorian Andes, flanked by two chains of volcanoes including Cotopaxi, Chimborazo and Cayambe. The name is associated with Alexander von Humboldt, who explored the region in 1802.
- How was Quilotoa lake formed?
- Quilotoa is a caldera: the volcano's summit collapsed after a large eruption roughly eight centuries ago. The crater gradually filled with water, and dissolved minerals give the lake its green colour.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Ecuador?
- In our collection, the places in Ecuador are most often mountains (2), volcanoes (2), crater lakes (2) and rock formations (1).
- How many places are on this list in Ecuador?
- The list covers 10 places.