Roaming South America

Puyo, Ecuador

August 26, 2025

Puyo, Ecuador. The name "Puyo" comes from the indigenous language of Quechua and it literally means "cloudy." Which it was every day I was there. Not just cloudy, but it also rained every day. But that's to be expected, any lower expectations would be unrealistic. Why? Quite simple - this is in the Amazon.

History?

That was covered in my previous blogs about Puyo, easy to find by searching for Puyo here on my site.

Some of the area activities

That's also been covered, so for now, I'll say this: Puyo is a pleasant town of maybe 35,000 (maybe up to 60,000 in the entire metropolitan area) in a beautiful valley with the Puyo River running alongside it. There is a nice park/malecon at the riverside, they refer to it as the Area Turistica - the tourist area. It's a nice place to visit, especially if you have children, they'll love the big animal sculptures.

Downtown Puyo is surprisingly large for a town with such a small population. This town is probably the biggest on the east side of the Andes Mountains in Ecuador, and is the main hub city for this region. The town is not historic in any way, there's no special architecture, but it's nice in that it is reasonably quiet for a commercial center of this size. There is very little horn-honking, no noisy 3-wheel motorcycles (moto-taxis), and possibly fewer small motorcycles in general than compared to other similar sized cities. Compared to the Amazon side of Perú - this is almost heaven.

And, here in Puyo you will find many coffee shops. After visiting a few smaller towns with no coffee shops and only instant coffee, this is so much better. I even found a very small coffee shop where the young woman used a French Press to prepare the coffee. She didn't even have an espresso machine. Usually, in Ecuador, you can ask for a café filtrado (filtered coffee) and they'll know exactly what you want. But for some reason not here in Puyo. There were even a couple of people who had no idea what café filtrado was, like they'd never heard of it before. Rather strange. But, I eventually get a pour-over coffee from them when I saw the pour-over cone on a shelf behind the guy. There is a lot of good coffee grown in Ecuador, so you would expect to find a coffee culture, at least in this region. It is here, just not to the extend that it is in Colombia. In Ecuador, it's more common to find espressos than proper coffee. Maybe that will change as time goes along. I hope so.

My Impressions about Puyo

Being that this was my third visit, I spent more time in my hotel room writing than outside exploring the town. In my previous visits I walked almost every street in town. It was nice, I finished the 4th draft of one of my WIPs (works in progress). Puyo is cloudy, even wet almost every day, and that extends pretty much all year round. The temps are a bit cool, especially at night, but that's to be expected. It's a pleasant town, bigger than you would expect, with lots to see and enjoy outside of town in the mountains and jungles. But, is it a must-see? No, but it is good for a couple of nights while passing through.