Although beaten by Guayaquil on the population stakes and in economic clout, Quito is the political and cultural hub of Ecuador. In this highly centralized country, there's no mistaking that this is where the power is wielded - by an elite class of politicians, bankers and company directors, often from old, moneyed families. It's not these sharp-suited business executives that grab your attention though, but the very visible presence of indígenas that form a large part of the city's population. While most other Latin American capitals have been stamped with the faceless imprint of imported US culture, Quito is still a place where Quichua-speaking women queue for buses in their traditional clothes, with metres of beads strung tightly around their necks, and where it's not uncommon to see children carried on their mothers' backs in securely wrapped blankets, as they are in the rural sierra. All this makes for a slightly exotic introduction to the country, though the proliferation of ragged shoe-shine boys and desperate hawkers trying to sell miracle products is a sobering reminder of the levels of poverty in the city, and of the social inequalities that exist here.

The key to orientation in Quito is to see the city as a long, vertical strip. At the bottom, in the south, is the old town , focused on three large squares: the Plaza de la Independencia (also known as the Plaza Grande), the Plaza San Francisco and the Plaza Santo Domingo . The grid-laid streets around these squares form a small, compact central core dominated to the south by a hill known as El Panecillo , crowned by a big white statue of the Virgin of Quito . Fanning north from old Quito towards the new town is an "in-between" stretch around Parque La Alameda , while the new town proper begins a few blocks further north at Parque El Ejido . Known by Quiteños simply as El Norte , the new town stretches all the way north to the airport, but the only bits you're likely to visit are the central areas of La Mariscal , just north of Parque El Ejido, where most accommodation and tourist facilities are located, and the business district further north, around Parque La Carolina .