Festival de la Marimba Esmeraldas

Festival de la Marimba in Esmeraldas celebrates Afro-Ecuadorian marimba music, the wooden xylophone-based tradition central to this Pacific coast province's cultural identity. Musicians, singers, and dancers perform the currulao and related rhythms that UNESCO recognized in 2010, jointly with Colombia's south Pacific region, as part of humanity's intangible cultural heritage.

Esmeraldas, on Ecuador's northern Pacific coast, holds the country's largest concentration of Afro-Ecuadorian communities, whose presence in the region traces to the sixteenth century, when enslaved Africans being transported by Spanish ships were shipwrecked or escaped along this coastline and established free settlements, at times in alliance with, and at times in tension with, the indigenous populations already living there.