Ecua-Andino Hats Ecua-Andino Hats Ecua-Andino Hats is an Ecuadorian company founded in 1985 by Alejandro Lecaro and Édgar Sánchez. The brand is dedicated to the production and exportation of Panama hats. It is one of the most important companies producing finished Panama hats in Ecuador. In 1985, Édgar Sánchez and Alejandro Lecaro started to sell local crafts, initially to tourists on the beach, and then from a small shop in the center of Guayaquil, Ecuador. In 1994, they decided to change the product range and concentrated on hats only. In 2012, UNESCO declared that the art of weaving a Panama hat in
Geography of Panama all, there are some 1,000 islands off the Pacific coast. The Pacific coastal waters are extraordinarily shallow. Depths of are reached only outside the perimeters of both the Gulf of Panama and the Golfo de Chiriquí, and wide mud flats extend up to seaward from the coastlines. As a consequence, the tidal range is extreme. A variation of about between high and low water on the Caribbean coast contrasts sharply with over on the Pacific coast, and some up the Río Tuira, the tidal range is still over . Nearly 500 rivers lace Panama's rugged landscape. Mostly unnavigable, many originate