Quito made its name with the Quito School — indigenous carvers gilding saints for Spain — and never stopped making things. This route runs from pre-Columbian ceramics to Guayasamín's murals, an 1887 opera house, and the studios of San Marcos and La Floresta.
Ecuador's sharpest pre-Columbian collection lives in a 17th-century adobe house on Cuenca street, roughly 5,000 pieces arranged by cosmology rather than chronology: Tolita shaman masks, Chorrera whistling bottles. Open 09:00–17:30 daily.
The Banco Central keeps Ecuador's indigenist pioneer in his own restored colonial house on Venezuela street: about 40 canvases tracking Egas from 1920s Andean portraits to New York surrealism. Four small rooms, entry free, almost always empty.
The old Jesuit university on García Moreno now works as the city's cultural centre: rotating contemporary Ecuadorian shows upstairs, the Alberto Mena Caamaño wax recreation of the 1810 massacre in the barracks cells below, plus a courtyard library.
Neo-Gothic begun in 1892 and deliberately grotesqued with iguanas, tortoises and armadillos in place of European gargoyles. A plank bridge crosses above the nave vault, then steel ladders climb the clock towers for the sharpest view over the old roofs.
Oswaldo Guayasamín's hillside compound in Bellavista: his house-museum holds the pre-Columbian and colonial pieces he collected, while the Capilla del Hombre next door hangs the vast Latin American suffering cycle under an unfinished dome.
Inside the drum-shaped Casa de la Cultura on Avenida Patria: Valdivia figurines, the Quito School's gilded polychrome saints, and a Gold Room whose Tolita sun mask is the most reproduced object in the country. Entry free, closed Mondays.
Quito's 1887 opera house, an Italianate horseshoe of red velvet and gilt on the Plaza del Teatro. Daytime tours reach the boxes, the fly loft and the frescoed ceiling; the box office sells same-night seats for zarzuela, jazz and orchestra nights.
A 1933 art-deco movie palace two blocks away, all Moorish-Spanish plasterwork, gutted by fire in 1999 and restored performance by performance ever since. The half-scorched shell now hosts theatre, dance and concerts amid the scaffolding.
In quiet San Marcos, painter Oswaldo Muñoz Mariño turned his colonial home into a watercolour museum. He frequently gives the tour himself, mixing pigment demonstrations with stories of the barrio's artisans, around a deep planted courtyard.
A near-vertical village spilling off the eastern ridge below the Hotel Quito. The 1649 sanctuary holds Juan Bautista Menacho's carved pulpit, rated the finest in colonial America, and the lanes below hide painters' studios and terrace cafés over the valley.
Five floors of Ecuadorian ethnography run by the Sinchi Sacha fair-trade foundation on Reina Victoria: Amazonian featherwork, Otavalo backstrap weaving, shamanic objects and the shrunken-head trade explained as history rather than spectacle.
La Floresta is Quito's arthouse quarter: Ocho y Medio screens Latin American and restored cinema from a converted 1970s house, with Pobre Diablo's live jazz, mural-covered walls and independent galleries within a few blocks.