Radio Canela Morona Santiago plays chicha and cumbia on 91.7 FM from Macas, a jungle-edge city that Ecuadorians call the Emerald of the East. The station is one branch of a national network built on tropical rhythms, broadcasting a genre that itself grew out of the Amazon basin the city sits on the doorstep of.
A National Network, One Amazon Branch
Radio Canela operates as a multi-station network across more than fifteen Ecuadorian provinces, from Pichincha and Guayas to Loja and Sucumbíos, with the tagline "Original como tú, humildemente los primeros," original like you, humbly the first, according to the network's own website. The Morona Santiago branch runs from Macas and keeps a schedule built around tropical genres, including a dedicated chicha block called Chicha Light every weekday evening and cumbia programming filling weekend mornings and weeknight slots.
Macas: Refounded Twice, Now the Emerald of the East
The city broadcasting that signal has a longer history than most Amazon-edge towns. Spanish captain Juan Villanueva Maldonado first founded it as Sevilla del Oro in 1538, and it was refounded under the name Macas in 1599, according to its city history. Macas became the capital of Morona Santiago province in 1929 and today sits in the Upano Valley at 1,050 meters elevation, nicknamed the Emerald of the East for its position just east of the Andes. The surrounding territory has been home to the Shuar people for centuries, and the modern city now functions as both an agricultural hub and the transportation gateway for jungle communities further into the Amazon.
A Genre Born in the Amazon, Not Just Played There
Chicha itself did not arrive in the Ecuadorian Amazon from nowhere. The genre, also called Peruvian cumbia or Andean tropical cumbia, took shape in the 1960s and 70s when bands in Peru's own Amazon basin began fusing cumbia and huayno with the electric guitar sound of psychedelic surf rock, according to a history from MasterClass. Los Wembler's de Iquitos, formed in 1968 in the Peruvian Amazon city of Iquitos, produced some of the genre's earliest hits, and the sound spread along the Amazon basin and into the Andes as rural migrants carried it into cities like Lima during the following decades.
Tropical Rhythms for a Jungle Gateway City
That history gives Radio Canela's chicha and cumbia rotation an unusually literal connection to its home city. Macas sits at the literal edge of the same Amazon region that produced the genre decades earlier, broadcasting music shaped by Amazonian migration and psychedelic guitar experiments to an audience living at the point where the Andes give way to the same jungle the sound came from.