Ecuador Indian Trails are ancestral routes that have been preserved and that you can visit. These are the hidden roads of Ecuador.
There are still a few roads in the Ecuadorian Andes where the description of walking in the clouds is very accurate in one way or another.
These are Inca trails that have been preserved and you can still drive through.
Paradoxically, thanks to their being abandoned and forgotten, they have managed to secretly survive the advances of modern urban development and modernization of the current times.
One of the advantages is that along these Ecuador Indian trails, the original plant and animal life has returned and recuperated, due to the nearly absence of heavy traffic, but the villages and towns along the Inca roads remained unchanged, allowing explorers a glimpse of bygone eras.
Those old and lost rural roads, which for centuries were the sole means of communication in the Inca Empire, linking the most important towns and cities, and whose names we read about in history books, are still thriving and refuse to disappear.
It is incredible to realize that these Ecuador Indian trails were built by hand as the use of machinery came only by the mid-20th Century.
The rural trails of Ecuador stem from a principle of connectivity that responded to the basic needs for communication and commerce, in its original form of exchange of products for the subsistence of the indigenous peoples, much before the arrival of the Spanish to America.
The Qhapac Ñan or Royal Inca Trail is a clear example of this. The Inca roads were perhaps the first routes that were drawn to leave a footprint, so that they would be still used in the future, and along which new routes would be open, as their tracing was along the best and most accessible routes to connect their people.
It is now possible for modern explorers to travel along some Ecuador Indian trails that maintain an aura of magic, history and nature, the Indian roads of Ecuador where time has stopped, where you can be enveloped by the soft clouds that rise from the Pacific Coast to the heights of the Andes Mountains.
It is the place where you can literally walk in the clouds and rediscover the hidden corners of rural Ecuador. Ecuador Indian trails will give you the opportunity of experiencing those essential elements that make Ecuador a unique country. Most of these Inca trails were built in the Andes Mountains.
The Andean paramos or moorlands are unique from any point of view, as they are found only in South America from Venezuela, through Colombia, Ecuador and Peru at altitudes between 2900 and 5000 meters (9512 and 16400 feet) at the snow-line.
In these remarkable ecosystems, life continues in a vast area covered by shrub vegetation that gently sways to the rhythm of the cool winds of the highlands, in a relaxing wave like movement on the slopes of the mountains, with high snowcapped peaks in the background.
However, their diversity is evident, to the north are the frailejones (from the Espeletia genus and other similar ones) large plants with wide stalks, and rose shaped tops that stand alone and proud like giants in the rough terrain.
But perhaps the most famous and complex are those of the mythical Cordillera of the Llanganates.
Not only for the difficulty of access but for being the only witnesses to the efforts, failed and fortunate, of the treasure hunters in search of the riches that Inca civilizations hid there on their way to immortality.
Another type of paramo are the dry ones, like those in Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, where there are large straw fields and not much else, so you can see the soil made of sand, like high-altitude deserts.
We invite you to explore the different Ecuador Indian trails, along the Avenue of the Volcanoes with excursions to Papallacta, the Antisana Reserve, the Cotopaxi National Park, Quilotoa Volcano, Cajas National Park near Cuenca, Podocarpus National Park in Loja and the Chimborazo Reserve.
You will have the opportunity to take a close and unhurried look at the magical landscapes of the highlands and walk in the ancestral Ecuador Indian trails that will provide lasting memories.
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