But the people of Salinas de Guaranda are anything but cold. This tiny pueblo of a thousand residents, although unassuming at first sight, is actually the location of something rather extraordinary. It’s home to a community formed almost entirely of co-operative businesses.

Josh had spotted Salinas in his Lonely Planet and immediately decided we had to visit. Their rural development is a perfect model of community-based tourism – and unlike the Disney-esque tourist villages so often touted as ‘authentic’ places to visit, Salinas is the real deal: a little mountain village as typically Ecuadorian as you can get.

But forty years ago, Salinas de Guaranda was poverty-stricken.

Like countless other tiny pueblos throughout South America in the early 20th century, the people of Salinas (so named because the sole means of labour here was salt extraction from a local mine) didn’t have access to medical care, schools or even to a road. The nearest town of Guaranda was a thousand metres lower in altitude but must have seemed like a world away.

But in the 1970s, an Italian missionary named Father Antonio Polo arrived in the region. He quickly established a fair trade co-operative in Salinas, whereby the locals could work together to produce local cheeses and then share out the profits equally. For a community that had previously only produced cheese and milk for self-sustenance, the concept of sharing the wealth made a lot of sense.

Over the following years, the pueblo took control of the co-operative concept, forming twenty four different industries. Today, the people of Salinas de Guaranda run over a hundred small businesses. They create a myriad of different products and distribute them around Ecuador: everything from cheese, chocolate and salami to footballs, sweaters and snails. Their ‘Salinerito’ cheese is particularly well renowned!

But the most surprising part? After spending a few days exploring Salinas de Guaranda, it doesn’t seem like the people of Salinas have any real idea of how fascinating their village truly is.

Arriving in Salinas de Guaranda

After spending half a day taking a bus from Riobamba to Guaranda, and then onwards to the village by way of a bumpy truck ride, we arrived in Salinas to see the small main square filled with preemptive celebrations for the annual Guaranda carnival. While music blared from the outdoor speakers, kids sprayed each other with canned foam and screamed excitedly, and as we crossed the square with our two large backpacks in search of our hostel, a man on stage shouted, “¡Bienvenido a Salinas, extranjeros!” in our direction.

I grinned happily. Anyone being so vocal with their greeting towards two foreign strangers was clearly happy to see us in their pueblo!

Equally welcoming was Luis, a local guy standing at the edge of the square in a distinctive red jacket with a dog at his side. Luis acted as one of the resident tour guides of Salinas de Guaranda, and offered to take us around the pueblo later that day and explain a bit more about the history of Salinas.

Our guided tour of Salinas de Guaranda

The first stop on our tour was the ‘El Salinerito’ cheese factory, where 90% of the population still work. As we walked up the road towards the factory, Luis explained to us how the Salinas co-operatives work.

Each co-operative has a coordinating council, the members of which are democratically elected. Of the twenty four different industries, cheese production is still the largest, which has allowed a certain amount of reinvestment in starting up many of the other coops, allowing them to reach fruition.

It’s a wonderfully simple method, but it relies on each of the cooperatives trusting in each other: something which is clearly more likely in a small community like Salinas. 

The cheese factory in Salinas de Guaranda

Sadly the Salinerito cheese factory wasn’t full of workers that afternoon (too many Guaranda carnival celebrations had impeded its progress) but just as we arrived a sudden rainstorm opened up above us. It meant we were momentarily stuck in the cheese factory’s welcome area – and free to snack repeatedly on the various cheese samples…!

The young women working at the counter giggled shyly as they played YouTube videos on their computer, and watched as Josh and I started dancing to the music. Eventually Luis ran down the dirt track in a borrowed waterproof to fetch his truck, and we spent the next hour driving along muddied tracks around the village, peering through steamed up windows and jumping out to visit each new location on Luis’s tour.

Over the next few hours, we visited dozens of Salinas de Guaranda’s cooperatives; each one more interesting than the last.

At Artesalinas, the all-female knitting cooperative, a group of jovial Ecuadorians showed us tables piled high with alpaca jumpers. At the chocolate cooperative, a small factory named Confites El Salinerito, we drank hot chocolate, tried yoghurt made from soy beans, and tasted Swiss-inspired chocolate flavoured with the famous salt from the local mines.

At Dolomiti, the sausage making cooperative, we salivated over rows of dried sausages hanging from the ceiling rafters and eventually bought ourselves an entire salami, before moving onto the football-making factory (sadly closed, although we peeked in through the windows to see rows of tables with half-inflated balls), and paid a quick visit to the oil factory, where natural plant oils were produced.

Finally we toured the wool factory, where we watched factory workers sorting huge bales of wool before they were spun and dyed.

Sorting sheep’s wool at the yarn factory in Salinas de Guaranda

When our tour eventually finished the rain showed no signs of stopping, so we said goodbye to Luis and ducked quickly into an almuerzo restaurant on the main square for a late lunch. Anita Lopez, the owner and namesake of the restaurant, placed two glasses of juice on our table and immediately announced,

“Este jugo es con agua limpia, ¡no te preocupes!”

As we peeled off our layers of damp clothes to drink our ‘clean’ juice, steamy heat clouded out from huge pots filled with soup and boiling rice which dominated the stovetop. Time for lunch.

A quick adjustment to the slow life in Salinas de Guaranda

Over the next few days we developed something of a routine: a morning of walking above the pueblo, almuerzo lunches at Anita’s, time spent playing with our new friend Luis’s two dogs in the street and smiling at different familiar faces, all of whom wished us a ‘buen dia!‘ without provocation.

In the afternoons we snacked on salami and cheese while the regular 3pm downpour soaked the streets outside. Curled up amongst the children’s blankets on our bed, I leafed idly through the Salinas comic book I’d picked up from a local store.

And in the evenings, we headed to ‘La V-Ka’, a pizza restaurant with only four tables and a poster for Ecuador’s first annual cheese festival hanging on the wall.

The owner and chef, a guy named Santiago Lopez, cooked pizzas for us with local Salinas cheeses and mushrooms, and when he ran out of pizza dough he left the kitchen and headed out into the rain for more. I’m pretty sure I’ve never visited a more trusting restaurant in my life!

By the time we left Salinas, our souvenirs included a bottle of chocolate soy yoghurt, three kinds of cheese, and various little bottles of ‘Pajaro Azul’ (Blue Bird), a local brandy liquor flavoured with herbs from Ecuador’s Andes.

We’d spent one evening being offered shots of ‘Pajaro Azul’ by the overly friendly owner of our hostel, who poured a generous amount into a small plastic cup from an animal’s horn he took off the wall. And on our final night, Luis drove us into Guaranda so we could drink yet more ‘Pajaro Azul’ in his favourite cafe.

Still wondering why Salinas de Guaranda is so special?

Forty years ago the people of this pueblo had nothing. Yet thanks to a change in the way they handle their economy, they’ve transformed into a fair-trade inspiration: shipping locally-made produce all over the world and welcoming curious tourists into their midst to see the process.

Moreover, the prevailing attitude in Salinas is wonderfully laid back. It’s a place where the appearance of two foreigners in a tiny and close-knit community warrants a cursory stare and a smiling nod of approval. Within hours of arriving, we were smiling and greeting the same faces as we walked around the entire pueblo (a walk which only takes twenty minutes).

Salinas is so laid back, in fact, that the road sign indicating an arrival doesn’t even mention the name of the village.

And yet, despite being an incredible example of the way that a cooperative society can work, nobody in Salinas shows you where to go or what to do.

The assumption seems to be that you’re probably already aware of what you’re doing if you’ve made it this far: to a chilly, misty pueblo buried in the Ecuadorian mountains, with a history soaked in salt but a future bright as anything.

Have you ever visited Salinas de Guaranda in Ecuador? What other community-based tourism have you found on your travels?