Baños de Agua Santa in the context of Ambato, Ecuador

Pastaza (Spanish pronunciation: [pasˈtasa]) is a province in the Oriente of Ecuador located in the eastern jungle. The capital is Puyo, founded on May 12, 1899, with a population of 33,325. The city is now accessible by paved roads, a recent development; the main road from Baños follows the Pastaza river into the province.

The Pastaza River surges into the province from the west and as the landscape flattens, meanders on to the Napo, a tributary of the Amazon. Natural resources of Pastaza are bananas, grapefruit, tobacco, cocoa and coffee. Tea has successfully been cultivated by a few British companies, and in the mid-1980s one of the companies was honored by a visit from Princess Margaret from the royal family of Britain.

Puyo (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈpuʝo]), also known as El Puyo, is the capital of Pastaza, a province in Ecuador. Puyo is located at an altitude of approximately 950 metres above sea level by the Puyo River, a tributary of the Pastaza River, which eventually leads into the Amazon River. True to its name, derived from the Kichwa word for "cloudy", the local climate is a wet one and the weather is often overcast.

Puyo was founded in 1899. Located between Baños, and the Amazonian cities of Tena and Macas, Puyo is the commercial, cultural and political capital of the region. In late 2006, the city had approximately 25,000 inhabitants. It was the fastest growing city in Ecuador in 2006. The seasonal changes in the climate are relatively small, and daytime temperature typically range between 18 and 24 °C, with sun and generally short, but heavy periods of rain daily.

The Pastaza River (Spanish: Río Pastaza, formerly known as the Sumatara) also known as the Patate, flowing in Ecuador and Peru is a large tributary to the Marañón River in the northwestern Amazon Basin of South America.

It has its headwaters in the Ecuadorian province of Cotopaxi, flowing off the northwestern slopes of the volcano Cotopaxi and known as the Patate River. The Patate flows south and in Tungurahua Province it is joined by the Chambo River just upstream from the town of Baños de Agua Santa just north of the volcano Mount Tungurahua and becomes the Pastaza. Seven kilometers east of Baños, it is dammed for the Agoyán hydroelectric project, which has created a silty lagoon by the village of La Cieniga. The Agoyán dam was placed in that location specifically to leave the famous Falls of Agoyán, about 5 km further downstream, intact. After the waterfall the river enters a gorge where there is very fast whitewater with class-4 rapids; it is often used for whitewater rafting although it is not considered to be of the same quality as the Tena River and is therefore less popular for the sport.