Ecuador tailor made holiday

Planet

During this trip you will stay at the Napo Wildlife Centre, a luxury eco-hotel in the Yasuní Reserve that was created by the local community partly to manage their natural resources in a sustainable way. Activities at the centre are based around the spectacular natural surroundings, including exploring the waterways by dugout canoe and hikes accompanied by native guides who introduces the secrets of medicinal plants and their applications. The Centre brings the community income from protecting the environment as well as sustaining their traditional low-impact culture and demonstrates more widely that there is an alternative to the oil and logging companies that want to operate there.

In line with our ethical policy, the other hotels where you stay are actively reducing their energy and water usage in different ways and buy their food nearby, reducing food miles and supporting local farmers. They also provide advice to guests about how keep their environmental footprint as small as possible through individual actions like turning off air conditioning and reusing towels.

People

A local guide will introduce you to one of the highlights of northern Ecuador, Otovalo market. Buying directly from the Otavalenos ensures that your money stays in local indigenous Quechua communities. The Quechua are very colourful but proud people, so understanding when and how to take pictures will avoid problems. Your local guide will help with this and ensure that you avoid misunderstandings, as well as facilitating a much richer experience for you.

In general, we have chosen hotels throughout Ecuador that provide employment and training to local people, helping to keep money within the local economy and equipping them with valuable skills for the future. Going beyond this, the Napo Wildlife Centre is owned by the local community and takes an active approach to preserving and celebrating indigenous life through cultural activities for guests. This set-up also helps it to spread the income from tourism more fairly and has funded projects such as starting an organic farm and chicken-keeping to provide nutritious and cheap food to the community.

If you are interested in optional activities at Cotopaxi, such as horseriding, we work with a locally-owned and run ranch. The ranch employs its own guides and cowboys who will show you a very different side to the beautiful scenery of Cotopaxi national park. The cowboys here use tourism to supplement their income from other ranching activities which helps to support this unique traditional way of life.