Guayas is a three-masted barque with a steel hull that can display a sailing area of 1,410 square metres (15,200 sq ft).

These four ships basic design is very similar to Blohm & Voss' Gorch Fock that was built more than four decades earlier.

On the Osaka-Pusan-Shanghai leg of this her first Asian trip the Guayas took aboard an officer of the Chinese navy for reefing training.

[7] By the end of 2008 the Guayas had visited 60 harbours in 25 countries and covered about 340,000 nautical miles (630,000 km) in its life.

[8] In 2010, she participated in Velas Sudamerica 2010, an historical Latin American tour by eleven tall ships to celebrate the bicentennial of the first national governments of Argentina and Chile.