Forty minutes from Quito, the landscape shifts entirely. City noise fades and a cloud forest takes over: the Chocó Andino Biosphere Reserve. Every year, the parish of Nono hosts a festival that has turned community tourism into a way of protecting the land itself.
Wilson Calle, a gastronomic journalism student at the School of Travel Journalism, traveled to the Festival del Chocó Andino to interview Nulvia Perugachi: a food management specialist, Ecuadorian chef, and coordinator of the reserve’s youth network. Their conversation is a good starting point for understanding how food, governance and volunteer work can sustain a mega-biodiverse territory.
It’s the kind of story we like to feature in our magazine’s English section, alongside other reporting on food culture and travel journalism from around the world.
What is the Chocó Andino, and why does its food culture matter?
The Chocó Andino is a biosphere reserve spanning 12 communities across four cantons. Its biodiversity shows up on the plate too: as Perugachi puts it, “there isn’t just one kind of orange, one kind of mandarin, there are countless varieties of food.” The youth network also works with unconventional edible plants, ones once dismissed as weeds and now rebranded as “buenazas”, the good ones.
Many of these recipes came from grandparents and were passed down without explanation, just habit. Recovering them, understanding their nutritional value, and giving them a place on the table again is part of the work the network does through workshops and food fairs.
A traveling festival, free of single-use plastic
The Festival del Chocó Andino was born eight editions ago, entirely as a volunteer effort, and moves to a different parish of the reserve each year. From its very first edition, it set an unusual rule for a traditional fair: zero single-use plastic.
The rule met resistance at first. Vendors who sold traditional dishes in plastic bags weren’t sure they could adapt. The solution came from the land itself: cabbage and achira leaves replaced plastic as wrapping and as plates.
“People loved it. The food fair turned into everyone wanting to eat their potatoes off cabbage leaves,” Perugachi recalls, laughing. The shift wasn’t just logistical, it was an exercise in environmental awareness that ended up more popular than the plastic it replaced.
Food, memory and passing the torch
One of the network’s most heartfelt projects is a traveling food lab where young people and elders cook together. In one session, grandparents put on chef aprons and hats to make colada morada with prestiños, while younger participants discovered dishes that have nearly disappeared from home kitchens, like corn colada with toasted corn.
For Perugachi, this work with elders matters as much as the work with youth: “our roots are our grandparents. They won’t be here forever.” Protecting that collective memory, she says, is part of protecting the land.
The network is also planning its generational handoff: it supports young people up to age 35, UNESCO’s cutoff for “youth”, and has already inspired other biosphere reserves in Ecuador, like Podocarpus and Sumaco, as well as groups in Peru who look to its governance model as a reference.
Community tourism as a circular economy
Around the festival, a web of small businesses has grown: Chala, a community-run agroecological store in Calacalí; an agroecological fair now in its thirteenth consecutive edition; El Patio, a restaurant serving Chocó Andino cuisine; and Cheesecakes a tu gusto, Perugachi’s own venture, made with fruit from local growers.
None of it is paid work. “Nobody pays us,” she explains. “We’re here because we believe in it, because we feel it, because we want a future for our children, for our grandchildren.” That commitment is also what has kept the festival free of political interests: it’s a project of the community, for the community.
A model for sustainable tourism worth replicating
This year’s festival slogan, “the land where water and life are born,” captures the philosophy behind the network’s work: the cloud forests of the Chocó Andino feed the clouds that in turn supply water to Quito, even though no visible river runs through the reserve itself. Protecting the forest is, quite literally, protecting the water that reaches millions of people.
That link between food, conservation and community is what turns the Chocó Andino into a case study for anyone trying to understand community tourism from the inside. It isn’t just about welcoming visitors, it’s about collectively deciding what we eat, how it’s produced, and who benefits.
Stories like Nulvia Perugachi’s show why gastronomic journalism needs to leave the restaurant and get out into the field. If you want to learn how to report stories like this one, with real method and craft, our Master in Gastronomic Journalism and Communication digs into how to research, interview and tell food stories as a way into a territory’s culture.