Casa del Alabado is the finest pre-Columbian art museum in Ecuador — a beautifully renovated colonial house in the southern part of the Historic Centre that displays around 500 pieces from cultures that inhabited what is now Ecuador from 4000 BCE to the Inca period. The collection is exceptional by any standard: gold work, ceramics, textiles, and stone carving from the Andean, coastal, and Amazonian traditions of pre-Columbian Ecuador.
The display emphasises the spiritual and cosmological significance of the objects rather than just their aesthetic qualities — each room is organised around a concept (death, fertility, transformation, the cosmos) rather than a culture or period, which makes the experience genuinely illuminating rather than just cataloguing. The building itself, a restored 18th-century house with courtyards and a garden, is one of the more pleasant spaces in the Historic Centre. Allow 90 minutes. Combined tickets with other Historic Centre museums are available.