EC — Ecuador

Ecuador is a South American country on the Equator (its namesake), with the Andes, Amazon rainforest, Pacific coast, and the Galápagos Islands. Quito, the capital, has one of the best-preserved colonial centers in the Americas and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Ecuador adopted the US Dollar (USD) as its official currency in 2000 after a severe financial crisis. For developers, the EC country code maps to the es-EC locale for Ecuadorian Spanish. The .ec domain serves Ecuador's web presence, and +593 is the dialing code. Ecuador's use of the USD creates an interesting situation — while the currency code is USD, the es-EC locale may have different number formatting conventions than en-US. Applications must correctly handle USD amounts formatted according to Ecuadorian conventions (period vs comma for decimal separator). Ecuador's dollarization means no exchange rate handling is needed for USD transactions, simplifying some financial applications but requiring awareness that the country code EC still maps to USD, not a local currency.