EcuEVP

On arrival to Ecuador most citizens in the world receive a 90 days tourist VISA automatically as long as the passport is valid for 6 months after leaving Ecuador. The few exceptions are citizens of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Eritrea, Kenya, Nepal, Pakistan and Somalia, who needs to apply for VISA 12-X, but if you are not sure or need more information, please check with an Embassy close to you that you can find under. They also state that you need a return ticket and proof of economic means to support yourself during your stay but this is something that we never heard them ask about in the immigration.

Whatever VISA you have you need to remember that it clearly states the first and last day and if you travel to another country with the plans to return you need to do so before it expires or you will need to apply for a new VISA in the closest embassy as you can not "save" unused days and you can only get one free 90 days VISA per year.

The tourist VISA of 90 days will be sufficient for most people that comes here as a volunteer or intern to take part of an project as long as they will not earn any money but for those who plan to stay for longer than 90 days needs to apply for the 12-IX tourist VISA that covers from 91 to 180 days in Ecuador. High school students that will take part of our exchange program will have to apply for a 12-V student VISA that we will help them to require the documents for.

Interns naturally falls into the student category but as only an educational institute can help with the documents to apply for this and not a company or organization the interns falls into a grey zone and can only come as a tourist.

There is an volunteer VISA, 12-VII, that you can apply for but the problem is the requirement of a document stating that the volunteer organization, in this case EcuEVP or the project, will be fully responsible for the participant financially and well-being. This sounds good but in reality that means that they will be responsible for any cost or problem that the volunteers causes so if for example a volunteer get drunk, steals a car and crashes into a Lamborghini we will get the bill and if we won’t pay we end up in jail. As you can see this is nothing that anybody wants to risk as we all have our families to think about so you will find it hard to get this document from any organization in Ecuador and we think it would be great if they instead demanded that anybody applying could show a document from their insurance company stating what is covered.