Time to Party!
- Mark Bradbury
- Oct 15, 2022
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 26
By Mark Bradbury
We are talking about fiestas, or parties, here in Ecuador this month. With some major holidays coming up, it’s a good time to tell you all what might be happening over the next couple of months. So, put on your costumes, buy a turkey, trim your tree, and buy the champagne! It is officially Party Season in Ecuador!
Every expat that I have met since coming here always wants to know about the holidays and their celebrations. Ecuador has quite a few holidays, called feriados in Spanish, that North Americans do not know anything about. They are usually national days, commemorated for their historical significance to Ecuador’s evolution as a country. We recently had a 3-day weekend here to celebrate the Independence of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city. For our local neighbors, it was a big tourist weekend, but for the expats it was just another weekend.
No disrespect intended, but sadly, too many who come here to live do not embrace the culture and the history of our great host country. Go back in time a couple hundred years, and all of South and Central America were colonized by Spain, Portugal, and a handful of other European countries. These European countries came here to take whatever they could from the land and its people; it was not an enjoyable time in the history of what would become Ecuador.
