Zaruma

A painted gold town standing on its own tunnels

Zaruma clings to the western edge of the Andes in Ecuador's El Oro Province, 1200 metres up where the Vizcaya range branches off the Chilla, a cloud-wrapped town of steep streets and early 19th century houses in tropical pastels. Its name is said to join two Quichua words, sara, corn, and uma, head, for the maize grown here and for gold the colour of a corncob. Its official name says the rest: Villa Real de San Antonio del Cerro de Oro de Zaruma, the royal town of the hill of gold.

People have dug gold here for more than a thousand years, since before the Incas. The Cañari settled the district between 500 and 1400 CE and were overpowered by the Incas under Huayna Capac in the 1480s. The legend of the place begins with the fall of the Incas. In 1533, the story goes, the Inca chief Quinará set out with a great load of gold to help ransom Atahualpa from the Spanish, and when he learned that Atahualpa had been executed he buried it in deep galleries near the Guatuchi Hacienda in Loja Province.

The Spanish came for what was left. Alonso de Mercadillo founded the first Spanish towns of the region in 1549, Philip II granted Zaruma its royal title in 1593, and Captain Damián Meneses formally founded it on 8 December 1595. Between 1536 and 1820 Spain is thought to have taken some 2,700 tonnes of Zaruman gold. An earthquake on 20 January 1749 destroyed the town and most of its mines, and an Indigenous uprising emptied it, but the miners came back. Zaruma declared its own independence from Spain on 26 November 1820.

Its old centre, republic-era timber and all, was put forward as a candidate World Heritage Site in 1998, and in 2019 the tourism ministry named it one of the country's first Pueblos Mágicos. Coffee is the other pride of the town.

The gold is also what is swallowing it. Veins under Zaruma yield as much as 180 grams a ton, against three to five at an ordinary commercial mine, and since gold prices soared early this century illegal miners, the sableros, have tunnelled with little regard for what stands above. There are so many tunnels that the engineer charged with stabilising the town, Ivan Nunez, says no one knows where they all go. Late in 2021 a sinkhole some 90 feet across and 100 feet deep opened in the historic centre and swallowed three homes in one night, leaving many more uninhabitable; the miners had dug a branch to within 20 feet of one of them.