Cotopaxi and Quilotoa Volcanoes All-in-One Day Trip

Overview

A private day trip covering both of Ecuador's top natural attractions near Quito — Cotopaxi National Park and Quilotoa's crater lake — letting you set your own pace with a private guide and driver.

A private guided day trip — letting someone else drive means you can soak up the Avenue of the Volcanoes scenery, while your private guide keeps the day on your own schedule.

Highlights

• Cotopaxi National Park Take in views of Cotopaxi's snow-capped volcanic cone.
• Quilotoa Crater Lake See the turquoise waters of Quilotoa's volcanic crater lake in the same day.

What Stops Does This Tour Make?

A popular starting point — every Voyzo itinerary is fully customizable, so we'll shape the order and stops around your group.

Important Information

Frequently Asked Questions

About This Tour

A private day trip covering both of Ecuador's top natural attractions near Quito — Cotopaxi National Park and Quilotoa's crater lake — letting you set your own pace with a private guide and driver. A private guided day trip — letting someone else drive means you can soak up the Avenue of the Volcanoes scenery, while your private guide keeps the day on your own schedule.

The road this tour follows south from Quito is the same corridor German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt named the "Avenue of the Volcanoes" in the early 1800s, after being struck by how many snow-capped peaks rose on both sides of the valley as he traveled through it. Today that same inter-Andean valley, now largely followed by the Pan-American Highway, still strings together dozens of volcanic summits, and this tour deliberately picks two of the most dramatic — and most different — of them for a single day.

Cotopaxi and Quilotoa make for a genuinely striking contrast once you've seen both. Cotopaxi is very much intact: a near-perfectly symmetrical, glacier-capped stratovolcano that sources place at roughly 5,897 to 5,911 meters, ranking among the highest continuously active volcanoes on Earth, and it has erupted more than 50 times since 1738 without ever losing its classic conical shape. Quilotoa, by contrast, is what's left after a volcano essentially destroyed itself — a catastrophic eruption around 800 years ago (geologists date it to roughly 1280 CE) blew out the summit entirely, and the resulting 3-kilometer-wide caldera is now filled with a mineral-rich lake that reaches about 250 meters deep, its turquoise-green color coming from dissolved minerals and the fumaroles still bubbling quietly on the lake floor.

Seeing both in one day means tracing the full arc of a volcano's life story along the same historic route Humboldt once rode — from an active, ice-capped giant still being closely monitored by Ecuadorian volcanologists, to a dormant caldera whose last major eruption reshaped the surrounding landscape for miles and is still clearly visible in the layered ash and pumice exposed along Quilotoa's crater walls today.