The markets
If you have one spare hour in Quito and want to understand the place rather than photograph it, go to a market in the morning. Not a craft market — a food market, where the city buys its lunch. It costs nothing to walk through, the eating is the best value in Ecuador, and you can have your spirit cleansed with a bunch of herbs on the way out.
The short version
- Go in the morning. Markets peak early and fade through the afternoon.
- Eat there. The upstairs food stalls are where the best hornado and caldo in the city are.
- Buy one of every fruit you do not recognise. A few dollars, and the best thirty minutes available.
- Cash, in small bills. Nobody can change a twenty at eight in the morning.
- Bag in front, phone in pocket. Crowds are where pickpockets work, here as anywhere.
Which market
- Mercado Central — the classic, close to San Blas and a short walk from us. Ground floor for produce, meat and fish; upstairs for the food stalls. This is the one to do first.
- Mercado de San Francisco — smaller, beside the plaza, easy to fold into an Old Town morning.
- The northern markets, Santa Clara and Iñaquito — bigger, less visited by foreigners, and a proper look at how a modern Latin American city feeds itself. Worth a taxi if markets are your thing.
- Otavalo, for textiles and crafts rather than food — two hours north and a different proposition entirely. See the Otavalo guide.
Eat upstairs
The food stalls above the produce floor are, dollar for dollar, the best eating in Quito. This is where people who work nearby have lunch, and the cooking is generally better than in restaurants charging four times as much.
What to order:
- Hornado — whole roast pig, carved to order, with mote, potato and a sharp agrio sauce. Join the longest queue; that is the correct one.
- Caldo de gallina — hen broth, long-simmered. The correct breakfast, and the correct hangover cure.
- Fritada — pork simmered then fried in its own fat, with plantain and corn.
- Seco de chivo — goat stewed with naranjilla until it collapses.
- A jugo — fresh juice from a fruit you cannot name. Ask for it en agua unless you want milk.
How to choose a stall: go where the locals are and where the turnover is fast. Food that moves is food that is fresh. More on the dishes themselves in what to eat in Quito.
The fruit
This is the part people remember. Ecuador's geography means a market here carries coastal, Andean and Amazonian fruit on the same table, and a good half of it does not exist in northern supermarkets.
- Naranjilla — sour, green inside, mostly drunk rather than eaten
- Tomate de árbol — tree tomato, tart and superb as juice
- Taxo — banana passionfruit, floral
- Guanábana — soursop, creamy and strange
- Pitahaya — the yellow Ecuadorian dragon fruit, far better than the pink
- Granadilla — crack it open and eat the seeds; children love it and adults find it alarming
- Uvilla, babaco, mora, chirimoya — ask, and someone will show you how
Buy one of each of five things you do not recognise. It will cost a few dollars and vendors are almost always delighted to explain what to do with them.
A limpia, if you want one
In several Quito markets you will find women offering limpias energéticas — a traditional cleansing, done with bundles of herbs, an egg passed over the body, sometimes tobacco smoke or flower water, with prayers or invocations.
It takes a few minutes, costs a few dollars, and it is not a performance staged for tourists — it is a living practice that Quiteños use, and the same stalls serve locals all morning. Visitors are welcome.
If you go, go respectfully: ask before photographing, do not treat it as a novelty, and follow whatever instructions you are given. If it is not for you, that is fine; walk past as you would any other stall.
The rest of the market
- The herb section — bundles of eucalyptus, rue, rosemary, chamomile, sold for cooking, for infusions and for the limpias. The smell alone is worth the detour.
- Flowers. Ecuador is one of the world's great rose exporters, and a bunch here costs what a coffee does at home.
- Chocolate and coffee — market stalls carry good Ecuadorian bars at better prices than the tourist streets. See coffee and chocolate.
- Cheese, mote and hominy, sold by weight from sacks, which is worth seeing even if you buy nothing.
How to behave
- Greet people. Buenos días before you ask anything. It costs nothing and changes the interaction completely.
- Ask before photographing anyone. Most will say yes; some will not, and that is their right. Photographing someone's stall is not the same as photographing them.
- Do not haggle over food. Prices are already low and fixed. Bargaining belongs at a craft market, not here.
- Small bills and coins. Break a twenty at a supermarket beforehand.
- Bring a bag. Single-use plastic is discouraged and you will buy more than planned.
Safety, briefly
Markets are crowded, which is where opportunistic theft happens — here as in Barcelona or Rome. Bag on your front, phone in your pocket rather than your hand, and only the cash you need for the morning. That is the whole of it; markets are otherwise entirely comfortable and heavily used by families. Our fuller view is in is Quito safe.
What we do here
The Mercado Central is a short walk from our door and reception will point you at it, tell you which day is busiest, and change a twenty into the small notes you will need. If you would rather go with someone the first time, ask — we can arrange a guide who will order for you and explain what you are eating, which for a first market visit is worth the small cost.
Go before nine, eat upstairs, buy the strange fruit
Nine rooms in a restored 1914 house on the quiet edge of the Old Town. Book direct for our lowest rate, and ask at breakfast which market to walk to.
See our best dealsTake the fruit list with you
Useful in front of a stall when you cannot remember what the orange one was called.
