Coastwalk California Coastal Trail

Río Muchacho Organic Farm is a pioneering project of community development, the first of it's kind in Ecuador. Established 20 years ago by Ecuadorian environmentalist and eco-tourism expert Dario Proaño Leroux, and his wife Nicola Mears, originally from New Zealand, Río Muchacho has developed into a standard-leading centre for conservation, permaculture, agroecology and environmental education. The farm works with both foreign volunteers and employed locals to continually improve standards of life and environmental awareness within the local community, whilst spreading the word locally, regionally and internationally about ecology, permaculture and organic agriculture - the founding principles of the farm.

The Organic Farm works alongside it's sister enterprise, Guacamayo Tours, an Ecotourism company operating in Bahía de Caráquez Ecocity. Guacamayo Tours runs tours and visits to various places of Ecological interest in the area, for example Isla de Corazón, home of the surviving mangrove swamps, and a colony of rare frigate birds. Guacamayo Tours is also responsible for booking many of the volunteers who come to work at the organic farm and on local community projects, and tourists who come for visits of one day to a week, in order to learn about the principles encouraged by Río Muchacho and experience the way of life in the local Montubio style - living in a cabaña handmade from locally grown bamboo and palm leaves.

Río Muchacho Organic Farm is also linked to a variety of other ecologically-driven projects, such as the farm-funded "Escuela Ambientalista" - environmental school - for local children, which provides environmental education alongside a fully-fledged academic curriculum; and "Ecopapel", Ecuador's first paper recycling project, which - using only human hand-power - produces totally recycled paper products, and provides a living for the all-female staff, whose previous source of income in the Chone estuary was destroyed in the El Niño disaster of 1997-8.