The walk down: a self-guided morning through the Old Town
Three hours, downhill almost the entire way, from the gate where the colonial city ended to the plaza where it was governed. This is not an itinerary of opening times — it is a route, with the things worth stopping to look at marked along it. Take a taxi back up at the end. At 2,850 metres, that last decision is the important one.
Before you set off
- Start by nine. The light is best, the plazas are waking up, and the churches are open.
- Go down, taxi back. Two dollars, and it saves you a climb you will regret.
- Many churches close for a couple of hours at midday. Do the interiors first.
- Shoes with grip. Wet cobbles on a slope.
- Cash in small bills for entries, coffee and the taxi.
1 · Plaza de San Blas — where the city used to end
Start in the small plaza with the church on the rise above it. Until the early twentieth century this was the northern boundary of Quito; north of here were fields. Read the plaque beside the church, which most people walk past. Then look at the church itself — one of the two oldest in the city, built for the Indigenous parishioners who lived out here on the edge.
More on the neighbourhood in San Blas, the quiet edge of the Old Town.
2 · The Basílica del Voto Nacional
Five minutes downhill. The largest neo-Gothic church in the Americas and, from this angle, enormous.
What to look at: the gargoyles. Where a European cathedral has demons and griffins, this has Galápagos tortoises, marine iguanas, armadillos, condors, monkeys and pumas. Stand back on the far side of the street and work along the roofline — it takes a minute to see the first one and then you cannot stop.
Whether to climb the towers is a separate decision: it is steep, exposed and a genuine effort at this altitude. Do it on your second or third day rather than folding it into this walk. Details here.
3 · Down Venezuela, into the grid
From the Basílica the streets begin to run in the colonial grid: straight, narrow, and laid out in the 1530s on a slope that did not really allow for it. You are now walking through the reason Quito is a World Heritage site — not any single building, but the fact that four hundred years of street plan survived essentially intact.
What to look at: doorways. Most colonial houses here are built around interior courtyards, invisible from the street, and many now hold shops, cafés or workshops. If a heavy wooden door is open, look in. Nobody minds.
Notice too that the buildings are low, thick-walled and buttressed. This city has been badly damaged by earthquakes more than once, and it shows in the architecture.
4 · Plaza Grande
The heart of it. Four sides, four powers: the Cathedral to the south, the Palacio de Carondelet — the presidential palace — to the west, the Archbishop's Palace to the north, and the Municipal Palace, the one modern building, to the east.
What to look at: the people. This is a working square, not a monument. Shoe-shiners with wooden boxes, retired men on the benches all morning, pigeons, someone selling ice cream. Sit down for twenty minutes and let it happen around you; it is the single most pleasant free thing in Quito.
If it is a Monday, the Changing of the Guard happens here at eleven, with horses and a band. Arrive early for a spot.
Step into El Sagrario, beside the Cathedral — free, small, and with a painted ceiling far better than its modest doorway suggests.
5 · Calle García Moreno — the street of the seven crosses
Leave the plaza heading south along García Moreno. This is the finest colonial street in the city and it has a name that tells you what it is: la Calle de las Siete Cruces, the street of the seven crosses.
Stone crosses were placed along it in front of the churches, marking a processional route through the city. Several survive. Count them as you go — it turns a walk down a street into something with a shape.
There is a reason for the density of churches here that is worth knowing: the Spanish habitually built their religious buildings directly on top of Indigenous sacred sites, and the processional route is laid over an older one.
6 · La Compañía de Jesús
A few doors down. From the outside, a carved volcanic-stone facade that took decades. From the inside — and you should go inside — a baroque interior almost entirely covered in gold leaf, worked on across roughly 160 years.
What to look at: the ceiling geometry, which is Moorish rather than European, and the faces of the sculpted figures, many of which are visibly not Spanish. Photography is restricted, which is a gift: put the phone away and look properly for twenty minutes.
This is the one paid entry on the route that nobody regrets.
7 · Plaza San Francisco
Continue west and the street opens abruptly into a vast sloping cobbled square with a white church and monastery filling one whole side. San Francisco was begun in 1536, a year after the city was founded, and the complex behind that facade covers three hectares.
What to look at: the atrium steps, and the story that goes with them. Cantuña, the Indigenous builder who contracted to finish them by an impossible deadline, made a pact with the devil, and then removed a single stone before dawn so the work was incomplete and the contract void. People will point out the missing stone. There are several candidates.
The church is free. The convent museum charges and holds the Quito School collection. Casa del Alabado, the pre-Columbian museum, is a minute away and is the best museum in the city — see the museums page.
8 · Lunch, and the decision
You have walked about two and a half kilometres, all of it downhill, and it is probably one o'clock. Eat here: a set almuerzo near the plaza for a few dollars, or the Mercado Central for the proper version.
Then choose. Either continue ten minutes south to La Ronda, the oldest street in the city — worth it if it is Thursday to Saturday, quiet if not. Or take a taxi up to El Panecillo for the view, and another one home.
What you should not do is walk back up to San Blas. It is 2,850 metres and every metre you came down is still there.
Things to notice all the way along
- The stone. Almost everything is built from grey volcanic rock quarried from the slopes above the city. It is why Quito looks like nowhere in Spain.
- Street names. Dates and battles — Venezuela, Guayaquil, Sucre, Espejo. The independence story is written into the map.
- Balconies. Carved wooden ones on the older houses, often with geraniums, which are a local point of pride.
- The roofs. Look up any side street towards the hills and you get the tiled roofscape that the postcards use.
- Numbers on doorways, occasionally with the year the house was built. If you see one from the 1600s, it probably is.
Practical notes
- Three hours at a walking pace with stops, four if you go into the museums.
- Bag in front, phone in pocket. The Old Town by day is busy and heavily policed; the risk is pickpocketing, not confrontation. See is Quito safe.
- Sun and rain in the same walk. Hat, sunscreen and a light rain layer, every month of the year.
- Water. You are dehydrating faster than you think at this altitude.
- Not on your first day if you have just arrived from sea level. Do half of it, sit down more, and finish it tomorrow.
What we do here
Reception will tell you what is open today before you leave, mark the route on a paper map, and call the taxi when you are ready to come back. If you would rather walk it with a guide the first time, we book that too — a good one turns the doorways and the crosses into a story rather than a list.
The walk starts at our front door, and it goes downhill
Nine rooms in a restored 1914 house at the old northern gate of the Old Town. Book direct for our lowest rate, and ask for the map at breakfast.
See our best dealsTake the route with you
This is the one to have on paper. You will be looking up, not at a screen.
