Qualla: Mache-Chindul Ecological Reserve

Mache-Chindul Ecological Reserve: Introduction

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Haplochromis, CC BY-SA 3.0. The upper mountains here are rarely dry. Haze drifts in off the Pacific and snags on the ridges of the Mache-Chindul range, keeping the canopy wet long after the coastal plain below has baked. This is the northern tip of Ecuador's coastal cordillera, isolated from the Andes by about 100 kilometers of plain, and it is one of the last meaningful remnants of the Choco forest on Ecuadorian soil. The reserve spans almost 120,000 hectares of that forest, protecting a transition zone where the drenched rainforests of the north grade into the seasonally dry forests of Manabi further south. Within its borders live more than 1,100 species of vascular plants, 491 species of birds, 136 species of mammals - and Chachi and Afro-Esmeraldas communities who have called these hills home for centuries.

Image: Haplochromis | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mache-Chindul Ecological Reserve: Where the Forests Change

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Laura Daly, CC BY-SA 4.0. Most ecological reserves protect a single ecosystem. Mache-Chindul protects the seam between two. In the north, the hills catch up to 3,000 millimeters of rain a year and support the kind of wet tropical forest most associated with the Colombian Choco - tall emergent trees drippi...

Image: Laura Daly | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mache-Chindul Ecological Reserve: The Community Inside the Forest

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diego Tirira from Quito, Ecuador, CC BY-SA 2.0. Long before the reserve was created in 1996, Chachi communities lived in the Mache-Chindul forests, and Afro-Esmeraldas communities - descendants of Africans who escaped enslavement on the coast - built villages in and around them. Their traditional uses of the forest - hunting, ...

Image: Diego Tirira from Quito, Ecuador | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mache-Chindul Ecological Reserve: Bilsa, the Biological Heart

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Haplochromis, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Jatun Sacha Foundation established the 3,000-hectare Bilsa Biological Station here in 1994, two years before the surrounding reserve was created. Bilsa became the scientific engine of the region. Since 1996 it has hosted the Center for Conserving Plants of the Western Forest,...

Image: Haplochromis | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mache-Chindul Ecological Reserve: Pressure From All Sides

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Haplochromis, CC BY-SA 3.0. The reasons the reserve exists are the same reasons it remains under strain. The timber in these mountains is valuable. The soil will grow cattle and sugar cane. The forest borders on large agricultural interests and on settlers pushing in along new roads. In 1991, before the res...

Image: Haplochromis | CC BY-SA 3.0