Quito and Cotopaxi represent the two dominant visual traditions in Ecuadorian Andean elopement photography. They are close enough to include both in a single trip but different enough that they cannot substitute for each other. The question is which visual character matters more to you, and whether you have the time and acclimatisation window to do both properly.
What Quito Gives You
Quito's historic centre is, by square kilometre, the most concentrated collection of colonial baroque architecture in Latin America. The Compañía de Jesús has a gold-leaf facade that catches morning light in a way that nothing in Cuenca or any Peruvian city quite matches. The Plaza Grande surrounded by the Palacio del Carondelet, the Archbishop's Palace, and the Metropolitan Cathedral offers a scale and completeness to the colonial setting that reads powerfully in photographs. Quito is a city backdrop, and the photographs it produces are about the relationship between two people and one of South America's great cities.
What Cotopaxi Gives You
Cotopaxi offers something that no city can: a single dominant visual element that makes scale immediately legible. The volcano rising nearly six thousand metres from the páramo grassland below it communicates something about the size of the world that no building can. Couples standing on the dark volcanic soil with the snowcap directly behind them produce a photograph that locates them absolutely: on the flank of one of the world's most active and most beautiful volcanoes.
Which to Choose, or Doing Both
If you are choosing one, choose based on what you want your photographs to say. Quito says: we were in one of South America's great cities, in a colonial world built four hundred years ago. Cotopaxi says: we were at the base of a six-thousand-metre active volcano, at an altitude where most people feel the thin air, in a landscape that has nothing human in it. Both are true and both are extraordinary. With two days and careful altitude management, you can do both.
Destination Wedding Photographer
Vancouver · Medellín · Worldwide
