Lago Agrio is where it began in February 1967: Ecuador's first oil well drilled by the US Texaco-Gulf consortium to ring in an era of black gold for the Ecuadoran Amazon. Fifty-six years later, the oil continues to flow, some 500,000 barrels per day that President Guillermo Lasso has vowed to double. But millions of hectares have been transformed -- for better or worse -- into Ecuador's oil capital. The region's forests are receding as pollution spreads, activists claim -- the landscape increasingly dominated by wells, pipelines, tanker trucks, oil flares and processing plants. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES ARRANGED IN SEQUENCES