Zaruma

A painted gold town standing on its own tunnels

A gold town in the south of Ecuador at 1,200 metres, where the Vizcaya range branches off the Chilla, founded by the Spanish explorer Alonso de Mercadillo and kept alive by its ore ever since. The name comes from two Quichua words, sara and uma, corn head, said to be for the maize grown here and for gold the colour of a corncob. The old town is timber, painted, and steep, republic-era architecture that has survived because the money kept coming out of the hills; Ecuador put it forward as a candidate World Heritage Site in 1998 and named it a Pueblo Mágico in 2019. The mining underneath is the catch: unregulated tunnelling has undermined parts of the town, and a school collapsed into a void in 2017.