NATURAL ENGAGEMENTS AND ECOLOGICAL AESTHETICS ...

For some, the remnants of this failed Quito in the jungle can still be discerned in the landscape. As
a teenager, Ventura was employed as a woodsman on the interoceanic highway that was to connect
the oil rich region of Coca to Baeza, from which there was a road on to Quito. His crew began in
Coca and they were to cut a transect to the west until the half way mark where they would meet
with a crew that was to have cut the transect originating in Baeza. They never met with the Baeza
crew and, running out of supplies, Ventura’s crew was forced to turn back; indeed, this road was
never built. The half way mark was approximately at a spot known as Quirihua near the Paya
Yacu, located on a plain to the north of the Suno River headwaters. Here Ventura was surprised to
find “cement” steps, as well as a stone road. These, he felt, were all that remained of the city that
the king failed to build. Ventura concluded that if Quito would have been built there, Ávila,
because of its proximity, would have also become a “big city” (“jatun llacta”) and by now its
inhabitants would have become “de-Indianized” mestizos like the highlanders (jahuallacta). 59
All of these examples illustrate how people of the “Quijos” region, today and in the past,
explain their economic and geographical isolation from a wealthy metropolis in terms of a failure
to establish that metropolis in their region. It is, in all these cases, due to local decisions and
acts—the failure to properly take care of the Virgin in Oyacachi or the rejection of the king and
his city by the Sumaco curaga—that Quito does not exist in the lowlands. I believe, as I will
explore subsequently, that this “personalization” of Quito explains in part why it is also seen as
accessible and why, in some ways, it is also seen as a potentially tangible presence in the forest.
Quito seems to have been imagined by the Runa as a kind of worldly paradise of opulence
and freedom to which whites, such as priests, had privileged access. Gianotti, a Josephine mis-
sionary, wrote in 1924 of finding a Runa peon on one of the oppressive rubber estates of the Napo
River. This man wanted to escape with the priests, thinking that he would thus be able to live in
a “paradise” in Quito:
Arriving on a dark and rainy night to Belleza […] we found a poor Indian
(indiecito) soaking and shivering with cold and hunger. “Who are you? Where do
you come from? Where are you going?” were our questions. With great effort he
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