Best time to visit Quito
If you're thinking of exploring Quito, you'll want to get the timing right to make the most of your trip.
June through September is considered the dry season, which means great mild weather that is ideal for outdoor adventures. July and August are particularly great, with clear skies and comfortable temperatures. August is also celebrated with the vibrant Festival of Lights.
October to November sees a transition into the wetter months, yet you can still enjoy Quito's attractions amidst occasional showers. December brings festive cheer with traditional celebrations marking the city's foundation. If you plan your trip in January and February, you'll catch the lively carnival festivities, which are worth travelling for.
Come spring (March, April and May), you'll find once again great mild weather as the dry season returns.
Calderón
Just 9km northeast of the capital’s outskirts sits CALDERÓN, a small town renowned for its brightly coloured figurines made of bread dough (masapán). The tradition is to take these to the cemetery on All Saints’ Day and the Day of the Dead (Nov 1 and 2) and place them on graves as an offering to departed souls. You can’t eat most of these painted and varnished figurines, but you wouldn’t want to chew off the intricate details, such as extravagant mock-filigree ruffs and fibrous hair. You can tuck into guaguas de pán (bread babies), with colada morada, the sweet, hot and purple, seasonal drink made with fruit, herbs and purple cornflour.
In town on Carapungo, the main street, there are a number of good artesanía shops. To get here by bus, take the Metrobus to the Ofelia stop and a “feeder” for Calderón.
Guayllabamba and El Quinche
Beyond Calderón, the Panamericana sweeps 700m down into the dry Guayllabamba gorge and plain. Stalls laden with jumbo avocados and exotic fruits line the main road into GUAYLLABAMBA, 32km from the capital and home to Quito’s zoo, the largest and best designed in the country. A few kilometres outside town, the Zoológico Guayllabamba puts the emphasis on crowd-pleasing native fauna, such as the Andean spectacled bear, pumas and condors.
Buses bound for Cayambe, such as Flor del Valle, which leave from Manuel Larrea and Asunción in the new town, usually stop at or just outside Guayllabamba. It’s a 30-minute walk up a cobblestone road to the zoo; at weekends there’s a free bus, otherwise a camioneta will take you for a small fee.
About 7km southeast of Guayllabamba lies the village of El Quinche, famous for its outsized church. For pilgrims, its most important feature is the wooden image of El Virgen del Quinche, carved at the end of the sixteenth century by artist and architect Diego de Robles, who was saved from tumbling hundreds of feet into the Río Oyacachi by a thorn snagging on his clothes.
Since Robles cheated death, the Virgin has been credited with countless other miracles, depicted by paintings inside the church and plaques on the walls. Visitors make their way from across the country to venerate her, especially during the festival in the third week of November, climaxing on November 21, and throngs of people receive blessings all year round. There are regular buses to El Quinche via Pifo from the Río Coca stop on the Ecovía system in Quito and others from Guayllabamba.
La Mitad del Mundo
Twenty kilometres north of Quito, at 2483m on the fringes of the dusty town of San Antonio de Pichincha, lies the colonial-styled complex of whitewashed buildings, gift shops, snack bars and museums known as LA MITAD DEL MUNDO (The Middle of the World), straddling the line that divides the earth’s northern and southern hemispheres and gives the country its name – the equator (latitude of 0° 0’ 0”). Charles-Marie de La Condamine and his geodesic mission first ascertained its exact demarcation in 1736–44, and a monument to this achievement was raised across the line in 1936. Deemed not grand enough, it was replaced in 1979 with the current one. Modern GPS readings have revealed that even the new monument is seven seconds of a degree south of the true equator, roughly 240m adrift, but the finding has done little to dent the popularity of the attraction – local crowds flock to the site, particularly on Sundays and holidays, when music and dance performances are held in the afternoons.
The complex
From the entrance to the site, a cobbled street, lined with busts of La Condamine’s expedition members, leads up to the thirty-metre-tall La Mitad del Mundo monument, a giant concrete monolith replete with large metal globe. From its base, a line representing the equator extends outwards – even running down the middle of the aisle (and altar) of the church within the complex. Inside the monument is the Ethnographic Museum ($3), accessed via a lift. Once at the top, you descend by stairs through the museum, which displays region-by-region exhibits on Ecuador’s indigenous populations and their customs, with fine exhibits of native dress and artefacts.
Among the other sites in the complex are various national pavilions, representing the countries that took part in the expedition, each with its own little museum. A planetarium on site offers rather unimpressive hourly shows, but the more stimulating Fundación Quito Colonial, contains richly detailed miniature models of Guayaquil, Cuenca and Quito – featuring their own artificial sunrise and sunset. Also within the complex is a post office, gift shops, an ATM, restaurants and snack bars. Pig out – and then try the weighing scales here, knowing you’ve actually lost a little weight while on the equator. Thanks to the earth’s own bulging waistline, gravity is weaker here, so you weigh less; unfortunately, your mass will be the same.
Pululahua
A visit to the Mitad del Mundo is commonly combined with a trip up to the rim of the extinct volcano of Pululahua, whose 34-square-kilometre crater – one of the continent’s largest – has been protected since 1966 as a geobotanical reserve. Its unusual topography and associated microclimates not only support rich, cultivated land on the valley floor, but also lush cloudforests, 260 types of plants and a large variety of orchids. Outlooks on the rim afford views over bucolic scenery within the crater, beautiful networks of fields and small settlements squeezed around the two volcanic cones of Pondoña and Chivo, all cradled by the thickly forested and deeply gullied crater walls. It’s best to get up here early in the morning as thick clouds engulf the crater later in the day.