Roaming South America

El Coca, Ecuador

September 22, 2025

Wedged between three rivers and surrounded by endless green, Coca is a town you don’t stumble into by accident. It’s the Amazon’s launchpad — equal parts oil town, jungle gateway, and riverside pause. Coca is built between these three rivers - the Napo, the Coca, and the Payamino. The city has a population of around 52,000, and was founded as "San Antonio de la Coca," then it was changed to "Puerto Francisco de Orellana," and then again, in 2019, the name was changed to "El Coca." Although the town dates back to the colonial years, it wasn't until the mid-20th century that it started to grow in earnest. That was due to the discovery of nearby oil fields.
Reference: wikipedia

History of Coca

The town dates back to the early 1500s. It was then that the Spanish conquistadors tried to exploit the gold, believing they would find El Dorado in this region. In 1541, the explorer Pizarro carried out a new exploration and discovered the Amazon River. From that time on the town never grew. There were a few rubber farms, a few missionaries, and some indigenous people. Until the discovery of oil in the mid-20th century the town, it was considered basically abandoned, left to die. But that oil did the trick and the town grew exponentially.
Reference: wikipedia

Geography and Climate

Coca is located in the northwest side of the Amazon Basin, in northcentral Ecuador. It is surrounded on 3 sides by 3 rivers - Rio Coca (east side) and Rio Payamino (west side) dump into Rio Napo (south side). Coca has a busy port that feeds supplies of all kinds out into the Amazon Basin. It also ferries people between many small towns along the river.

The climate is, of course, equatorial. Therefore, you'll get rain year-round, except during my four days here there's been rain. I don't mind. It's been very pleasant, actually. The average daytime high temp is 28° C (82° F), and the average night low is 22° C (72° F). The number of rainy-days per month average 18. And the humidity is pretty much always hovering 80-90%.
Reference: Climate-Data.org

Tourism

Coca is becoming known as a tourist destination, but not for anything here in the town itself. The region around the town is loaded it all kinds of eco-tourism opportunities. Here in Coca, they have:

• Jardín Botánico del Coca, El Moretal - a nice, privately owned, botanical garden. You pay $3 and get a guide who not only tells you names and descriptions, but lets you eat a few plants as well.
• La Bocana Parque Ecológico, which is a nice walk, and no entry fee. The paths are metal and raised up over the mangroves. There is a tall viewing tower and a couple of restaurants in the park, and a few more restaurants outside the park. In the park there are, supposedly, caiman and boas, as well as many other critters. When I arrived at the park it was just going on 6pm so my few pics are all after-dark pics.
• Coca has a zoo, of sorts. It's really an animal rescue center, but they also have opened it to the public. The town has a nice malecon, it's not particularly large, only 7 or 8 blocks long. And, I found only 3 parks in the town, and that includes their Parque Central which is nice, but nothing to write home about.

References: wikipedia

My Impressions

I spent 4 days here in Coca, the weather was very nice, the people are friendly (as expected, this is La Selva, after all). First, if you visit Coca, you have to go to the Heladería SweetCold. It's on the main drag, Av. 9 de Octubre at Calle Putamayo. They have a Facebook profile called Heladería Sweet Cold. The town has no class colonial architecture, or any interesting architecture of any year. It is built alongside, and around, its airport. The airport can handle planes up to 737 size. The town is generally clean, there's very little litter in the streets. Because the town is long and narrow, it's quite a walk from one end to the other, as in - almost a 1 1/2 hour walk. That's crazy for a town of 52,000 people.

So, should you put Coca on your must-see list? No. Only if you're into adventure sports, you might find something here, or you're using it as a base to explore the Amazon region around here. But, it's a nice place to stop for a bit to eat.
Reference: me