Tena, Ecuador

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Tena is a city in "el Oriente" (the Eastern, Amazonian part) of Ecuador, which was founded as a missionary outpost and still has a Catholic mission. It is located southeast of Quito, and is the commercial centre and capital of the Napo Province. The population of the town is around 26,000 people (2007) and has been doubled over the last ten years, which have also seen a halving of the forested area in the province.

Tena lies at the foot of the Andes mountains at 500 m and is, therefore, often seen as a gateway city to the Ecuadorian part of the Amazon Rainforest. The town is centred at the confluence of the Tena and Pano rivers- they meet to form the river Misahualli. A popular pedestrian bridge, "el puente pietonal", crosses the rivers in the central part of the town. The river Misahualli turn is a tributary to the River Napo further downstream, and the Napo is in turn the ninth biggest tributary to the [Amazon] river.

The city is home to a major regional hospital and many tourist related businesses, including several rainforest tour operations as well as at least three businesses that take paying customers on white water rafting trips on class three, four and five rapids in nearby nearby rivers. One of the local tourist attractions, in town, is a small wildlife park called ¨Parque Amazonico¨, which is located on the peninsula formed where the rivers Pano and Tena meet.

Tena and its surrounding indigenous communities are also bases for many volunteers working for reforestation projects, with community support in development initiatives in diverse, but connected areas such as bio-piracy, ecotourism and capacity building. [Ecuador] has one of the best politically organized indigenous populations in Latin America and Tena houses two major confederations, Fonakin (Federacion de Organisaciones de la Nacionalidaded Kichwa de Napo) and Ashin (Association de Shamanes Indigenas de Napo); one of the major stand-offs during the 2001 indigenous uprising in Ecuador, took place in Tena. The entry to the city from the near-by town of Archidona (on the road to [Quito]) is marked by a statue of the indigenous hero, Jumandy, who bravely led an indigenous uprising against the violent Spanish colonizers in 1578, for which he was ultimately executed in a publicly humiliating manner typical of the Christian conquistadores, described by anthropologist Michael Uzendoski.

In comparison to Puyo, the capital of the neighboring province Pastaza, which is both bigger and growing faster, Tena has a lively night life with bars familiar to foreigners. Friday and Saturday nights hordes of volunteers, guides (both indigenous and foreign), and local young people assemble in the Araña Bar on the West side of the rivers, near the "puente pietonal" and later in el Yagé Bar on the East side of the rivers. Tena also boasts a range of "discotecas" playing loud reggeaton and a wide variety of "comidas tipicas", preparing and serving food in the traditional manners of the [Napo Runa].

Ecuador, despite its relatively small size, has the eighth highest bio-diversity in the world, but it is increasingly threatened by natural resource extraction processes and human settlements^[1]

"The impact of oil exploitation in Eastern Ecuador is now notorious as a result of a long-running $6 billion lawsuit involving 30,000 Amazon forest dwellers and Texaco, once one of the world's largest energy companies but now part of Chevron. In the 25 years that Texaco operated in the Oriente region of the Western Amazon, the oil company spilled 17 million gallons of crude oil into the local river systems (by comparison, the Exxon Valdez only spilled 11 million gallons in Alaska in 1989), dumped more than 20 billion gallons of toxic drilling by-products, and cleared forest for access roads, exploration, and production activities. As of the mid-1990s, lands once used for farming lay bare and hundreds of waste pits remained. In August 1992, a pipeline rupture caused a 275,000-gallon (1.04 million L) spill which caused the Rio Napo to run black for days and forced downstream Peru and Brazil to declare national states of emergency for the affected regions."

The mixture of outstanding beauty, many remote rivers, lively traditional indigenous cultures, a very high concentration of bio-diversity, and the threats and challenges that these characteristics face, attracts many volunteers, biologists, zoologists, anthropologists, social scientists, philosophers, environmentalists, writers and adventure tourists.