The Devil's Nose train: the railway that conquered the Andes through impossible terrain

In 1899, President Eloy Alfaro contracted the American firm Harman to build a railway connecting Quito to Guayaquil. The problem was obvious to anyone who looked at a topographic map: between the Andean capital and the Pacific port, there is a drop of more than 3,000 meters in roughly a hundred kilometers. The engineers of the era called it impossible. The Ecuadorians built it anyway, at a human cost that historians have never been able to fully quantify.

The most difficult section of the entire line was a ridge of volcanic rock between Sibambe and Alausí, in Chimborazo province, where the topography makes any reasonable railway gradient unachievable. The engineers’ solution — a switchback system where the train alternates direction three times to gain and lose altitude — gave the place its permanent name: la Nariz del Diablo. The Devil’s Nose. Because only the devil could have designed a landscape like this.

The construction: the human cost of engineering

The Guayaquil-Quito railway took nine years to build and was inaugurated in 1908. The Devil’s Nose section was the slowest and the deadliest. The workers — Jamaicans brought specifically because Ecuadorians refused to work in the existing conditions, alongside indigenous laborers recruited under duress — carved volcanic rock with dynamite and hand tools under conditions the historian Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco described as “a form of slavery disguised as wages.”

Exactly how many died is impossible to know. Records from the period are incomplete and partially falsified. Estimates range from several hundred to several thousand. Conditions included malaria, dynamite accidents, falls, and working hours extended to the limits of what human endurance could tolerate.

The 1908 inauguration was a national event. The railway connected the Sierra and the Coast for the first time, reduced the journey from weeks to hours, and transformed the country’s economy. It also transformed the political landscape: regions that had previously lived in near-isolation began interacting with a frequency and intensity that remade Ecuador’s internal geography.

The train today: Riobamba to Alausí

Ecuador’s railway system was progressively abandoned from the 1980s onward as road construction made it economically untenable. The line was closed for years. In 2008, the government of Rafael Correa began its restoration as a cultural and tourism project, and today a tourist service operates between Riobamba and Alausí with a stop at the Devil’s Nose.

The journey covers roughly eighty kilometers in approximately three and a half hours, with the climactic moment in the switchback descent: the train drops a hundred meters of altitude in four kilometers, changing direction three times on a wall of black rock that falls almost vertically to the Chanchán River canyon below.

• 📍Departure Riobamba (2,750 m)
• 📍Destination Alausí (2,340 m) · with stop at Devil's Nose (1,800 m)
• ⏱Duration Approx. 3.5 h
• 💰Price $20–25 per person
• 📅Days Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday
• 🎟Booking Required online at trenecuador.com (sells out)

The descent of the Devil’s Nose is experienced from the exterior of the train — standing on the roof of the carriages — which adds an element of wind and exposure that intensifies the switchback section. There are handrails, and the service isn’t reckless, but it is an experience that happens standing on the roof of a moving train as a wall of rock passes a few meters away.

Riobamba: the city of Chimborazo

Riobamba is the capital of Chimborazo province and the city from which the train departs. It has something that many similarly-sized Ecuadorian cities have lost: a functional historic center with nineteenth-century republican buildings still serving their original purposes — markets, offices, churches — without the degree of tourist gentrification that has reshaped Quito or Cuenca.

Riobamba’s main attraction, beyond being the railway departure point, is its relationship with Chimborazo. At 6,263 meters, Chimborazo is not the world’s tallest peak measured from sea level, but it is the point on Earth’s surface furthest from the planet’s center — due to the equatorial bulge. This is a technical distinction, but it carries symbolic weight: Chimborazo is where the Earth reaches furthest into the universe. From Riobamba on clear days, the entire mountain is visible.

The Chimborazo Fauna Production Reserve, about thirty kilometers from the city, allows access by vehicle to the Whymper refuge at 5,000 meters, where the glacier is visible and vizcachas — Andean rodents resembling large rabbits — move among the rocks with complete indifference to visitors.

The Guamote market

Half an hour from Alausí, the village of Guamote holds one of the most authentic indigenous markets in the Ecuadorian Andes, on Thursday mornings. It doesn’t appear in standard tourist itineraries, which is part of its value: it is an exchange and sales market for rural communities in the area, with livestock, seeds, clothing, agricultural produce and a level of commercial activity that makes time seem to have stopped somewhere in the twentieth century.

Combining the Thursday train with a morning at the Guamote market creates a day that few guides suggest and that rewards the traveler willing to plan around it.

How to get to Riobamba

Riobamba is three hours from Quito and ninety minutes from Baños by bus. It sits naturally on the central Ecuador circuit, making sense as an overnight stop before catching the train the following morning. Buses from Quito leave from Terminal Quitumbe frequently throughout the day.

Alausí, the train’s final destination, is a small town with little reason to visit beyond the railway itself. From there, a bus back to Riobamba takes one hour, or you can continue to Cuenca in three hours — which makes the Riobamba → Devil’s Nose → Alausí → Cuenca route one of the most cinematically satisfying transit sequences in the country.

The Devil’s Nose is not the longest, fastest or most luxurious railway in Latin America. It is the one with the most dramatic history and the most improbable landscape. For a traveler who understands that the best journeys are the ones with layers, that is enough.