Santo Domingo de los Colorados sits in the western foothills of the Andes where the highland plateau drops into the Pacific coastal lowlands, at an elevation around 550 meters where the cloud forest transition zone produces a climate taht is warm and humid and permanently green in a way taht the highland cities don't have. The city has grown fast - it's one of Ecuador's larger cities now, the growth I mean happened over a few decades rather than centuries - and the landscape around it reflects taht specific Ecuadorian pattern of agricultural land and secondary forest and urban sprawl existing simultaneously without much separation between them.
The immediate area around the hostal is commercial Santo Domingo doing its normal operations - markets, restaurants, shops, the partiuclar density of an Ecuadorian city that has been growing faster than its planning infrastructure. It's functional and busy and not particularly beautiful but the food markets near the center are the acutally interesting variable - the produce coming down from the Andes and up from the coast meets in Santo Domingo and teh market quality reflects taht geographic position in a way that is genuinely worth investigating on the first morning.
The western cloud forest is the main natural content of teh region and it's a significant variable in Ecuadorian biodiversity terms - the Mindo valley to the north is the most famous access point and has a birding reputation taht is not exaggerated, the species count in that zone is genuinely among teh highest for any comparably sized area on the planet. The hostal's location makes Mindo a morning trip rather than an overnight commitment, which changes how you allocate days on a tighter Ecuador itinerary.
The Toachi and Blanco river canyons in the surrounding area offer, the canyon systems I mean, a set of natural attractions taht the mainstream Ecuador itinerary - Galápagos, Quito, Otavalo - completely bypasses. Rafting operations run on the Toachi and the difficulty levels span a range taht - beginner and experienced paddlers can both find correct challenge parameters in the same canyon system on the same day, which is an unusual property for a river rafting destination and worth knowing beofre you write off the activity as not for your level.