Quito's old town survived earthquakes and republic-building almost intact, which is why UNESCO listed it first in 1978. Three days here run from Valdivia pottery through the 1822 battle for independence to a hill museum built for the conquest's victims.
Housed in the Hospital San Juan de Dios, founded in 1565 and treating patients until 1974 — the oldest hospital building in South America. Restored wards, stone laundry courtyards and a 16th-century pharmacy. $3, Tue–Sun 09:30–17:30.
A 1671 colonial house holding some 5,000 pre-Columbian works: Valdivia fertility figures from 3500 BC, Jama-Coaque shamans, Tolita gold masks. Rooms follow Andean cosmology — underworld, earth, upper world — rather than dates.
Cloistered Carmelite convent since 1653, built over the house of Santa Mariana de Jesús, Quito's patron saint, who died here in 1645. Opened to visitors in 2013; the nuns still sell herbal remedies through a wooden turnstile.
The Dominicans' church of 1581, with a Mudéjar coffered ceiling and the Fray Pedro Bedón museum of Quito School canvases. The plaza outside served as the colonial grain market before the Sucre equestrian statue arrived in 1892.
Set on the Pichincha slope where Sucre's army defeated the royalists on 24 May 1822 and sealed Ecuador's independence. Military museum, an Eduardo Kingman mural and the mass grave of the battle dead sit on the ridge.
The townhouse Antonio José de Sucre bought after Pichincha and shared with his wife Mariana Carcelén, leaving it in 1830 for the ambush that killed him at Berruecos. Weapons, uniforms and original furniture across two floors.
Begun in 1892 and never formally finished — local belief ties its completion to the end of the world. Neo-Gothic in Ecuadorian stone, its gargoyles carved as Galápagos tortoises, iguanas, armadillos and condors.
The theatre opened in 1887 on the site of a colonial slaughterhouse, on a square where royalist executions were staged in 1810. Neoclassical façade, gilt horseshoe auditorium, box office under the arcade.
Quito's quietest colonial quarter, laid out in the 1560s around San Marcos church. The museum keeps letters, a lock of Bolívar's hair and belongings of the woman who saved him from assassination in Bogotá in 1828.
A 1649 sanctuary above the ravine road the Spanish followed towards the Amazon, the route Orellana took in 1541. Inside is Juan Bautista Menacho's carved pulpit, long judged the finest woodwork in colonial Quito.
Oswaldo Guayasamín's memorial to the victims of conquest, dictatorship and the mines, opened in 2002, three years after his death. His house next door holds the pre-Columbian and colonial art he collected for decades.
This glass-and-iron hall arrived from Europe in the 1890s as Quito's Santa Clara market, was dismantled a century later and rebuilt on the hill in 2004. It now frames the whole colonial grid below.