Audioguides Quito

Quito was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978 -- one of the first two sites ever named, alongside Krakow. The historic center preserves the largest and best-maintained collection of colonial architecture in the Americas: 320 hectares, 130 major monuments, and 5,000 registered heritage properties that were never fully dismantled or replaced. The city was founded by the Spanish in 1534 on the ruins of an Inca settlement, and the indigenous patterns of the original layout remain visible in the narrow, sloping streets of the old town.

Quito sits at 2,850 meters on the eastern slope of the Pichincha volcano, making it the second-highest national capital in the world and the closest to the equator.

The Church of La Compania de Jesus, whose interior is entirely covered in gold leaf applied over 160 years of construction (1605-1765), is one of the baroque extremes of Latin America -- genuinely disorienting to stand inside, as though the entire space has been turned to concentrated light. The equatorial line runs 35 kilometers north of the old town at the monument called La Mitad del Mundo, though GPS measurements reveal the actual equator is 240 meters further north than the monument marks it.