PENIPE, Ecuador: Ecuador's erupting Tungurahua volcano has dumped an inch of ash on nearby villages, causing major crop damage in an agriculturally important area, officials said Saturday.

Several villages on the volcano's western flanks are being destroyed by falling ash that billowed over the highland plain and darkened the sky, said Juan Salazar, mayor of farming hamlet of Penipe.

Volcanic activity remains very high at Tungurahua, 95 miles southeast of the capital of Quito, although without lava flows in recent hours, according to Ecuador's Geophysics Institute.

The volcano is spewing a steady column of ash up to 2.5 miles high and toward the northwest, said Patricio Ramon, volcanologist at the institute's Guadalupe monitoring station near the volcano.

President Rafael Correa visited Penipe on Saturday to present 185 temporary housing units to villagers displaced by the eruptions.

Last week, the government ordered the evacuation of 3,000 people living near the volcano.

Experts at the Geophysics Institute have compared the volcano's recent activity to the massive 2006 eruptions that buried entire villages, leaving at least four dead and thousands homeless.

The 16,575-foot Tungurahua, which means "throat of fire" in the local indigenous Quichua language, has been active since 1999. It has been spitting out ash and gases intermittently since late last year.