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Today I passed the day in the museums. As it was an ugly cloudy day, in the morning I visited the museum Antiguo Cuartel of la Real Audiencia in the center of the city. The building was restored and has a great collection of sacred art. University students guide the visit showing the different faces of the museum. The majority of the pictures did not have author, according to the guide it is because they were done by mestizos and indians, and these did not have the right to sign their paintings.
On the afternoon I visited the Casa de la Cultura, a complex with diverse exhibition halls, museum and cinema. The Museo Nacional has an excellent display of art from pre-Columbian period to nowadays. Here it impressed me their organization to the pre-Columbian art area. This art is displayed in dark rooms, black walls, shown inside of illuminated windows. It is all catalogued by tribe and time. Together, there are maps of the Ecuador showing the region where the tribe inhabited...
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The Mitad del Mundo city is about 15km away from Quito. It is the landmark of latitude zero. Very small, it looks like a hole surrounded by mountains. On Sundays it is crowded with tourists, the great majority is local tourists who go to visit the monument, the museum and walk around the place. Sometimes there are music and dance performances. Unfortunately I couldn’t see it because the performance was cancelled due to the rain.
Some people say that the monument is not on latitude zero. They say the calculus of the location is wrong, but once there, people say that the equator line marked in the ground is correct. Inside of the tower there is an ethnographic museum. People go up by elevator and go down by stairs seeing an exhibition about the indigenous culture of Ecuador. The museum is small but well organized. There are maps of each region and models showing the clothing of each tribe...
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About 95 km away from Quito, Otavalo is one of the main open markets in Ecuador. It has been there for hundreds of years, even before the Spanish arrived. It is from the pre-Colombian period, when the indigenous people from the coast came to exchange merchandises with the Andean people. The best day to visit the market is on Saturday, when the biggest merchandises exchange happens. The streets get crowded with people and tents.
Nowadays the market is very popular among the tourists. There is a area of handcraft envisioned towards them. It is really big, I had never seen anything like this. Blocks and blocks full of tents selling bags, sweaters, bracelets, objects in wood, carpets, hats and anything else you could imagine. Everything is very colored and really well done. I wish I could take everything, the problem would be to carry it in the backpack for the next 4 months…
Something that caught my attention in the market was the beauty of the Ecuadorian indigenous women...
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