The city, administratively a rural parish of the canton of Quito, is located in the valley of the headwaters of the Guayllabamba River, to the west of Pambamarca.

A 16th century wooden image of the Virgin Mary attracts more than 800,000 people on a pilgrimage to the shrine in November.

Following a common Inca policy, much of the local population was forcibly relocated to a distant province and replaced by colonies of non-locals, a process called mitma.

[4] El Quinche was the southernmost settlement of what was called the Pais Caranqui, a group of northern Ecuadorian chiefdoms, which opposed the expansion of the Incas into their homelands.

An Inca road stretched from Quito to El Quinche and onward to Pambamarca and toward the lowland tropics of Ecuador.