ABSTRACT
The town of Saraguro, with a moist, temperate climate, lies at an altitude of 2,520 metres in the Andes of southern Ecuador. In a hard day’s walk westward from the town, one can descend to a warm, dry desert area only 1,000 metres above the level of the sea. An even harder day’s journey to the east would follow a gradually ascending route through cultivated fields, scattered montane forest and high, wet, cold paramo grasslands of the continental divide at elevations of over 3,200 metres – followed by a precipitous descent through the moss-bromeliad- and orchid-covered trees of the cloud forest – to arrive in the warm, subtropical rain forest of the Upper Amazon Basin at an altitude of around 1,500 metres.
