Cuenca High Life

by Susan Schenck One of the things that makes Ecuador stand out as a favorite place for expats is the variety of ways in which one can obtain residency (pension, investment, property) and visas (tourist, student, work, professional, volunteer, and a few others). But what happens if you ... [More]

by Susan Schenck One of the American traditions we often cut back on when we move to Cuenca is that of shopping marathons. In San Diego, I sometimes shopped for an hour and a half just to unwind from the long week’s workload. I had to get my daily walking in anyhow, so if I wasn’... [More]

The famous indigenous outdoor market in the town of Otavalo, a two-hour drive north of Quito, is one of the best places to buy Andean art, crafts, textiles and indigenous jewelry in Ecuador. But if you're visiting Ecuador and your trip is limited to Cuenca and environs, you'll find plenty ... [More]

With the notable exception of the Otavalan craftspeople and merchants of northern Ecuador, no other indigenous Ecuadorian community has maintained its ethnic identity like the Saraguros. Centered around the town of Saraguro, 80 miles south of Cuenca, the Saraguro nation, which numbers between... [More]

Among the first sights noticed by newcomers to Cuenca, along with the billowing white clouds, the rolling green hills, and the red-tile roofs, are the big blue buses that spew black fumes into the otherwise colorless alpine air. Hundreds of them bomb around town, from roughly 5:45 a.m. till ... [More]

GringoTree and two of Cuenca´s top tour agencies are teaming up to offer a series of tours of the Cuenca area and beyond. The first tour, “Two Worlds of Yunguilla,” is Tuesday, Sept. 6, and will visit Giron, the Tarqui Battle Memorial and Museum, the El Chorro waterfalls and the ... [More]

Tucked away in the deep south of the Ecuadorian Andes, Vilcabamba is a place steeped in legend.   It has been called the "Valley of Longevity" for claims of its large population of elderly residents. Locals, and some scientists, say that it possesses special, almost magical... [More]

As Calvin Trillin wrote in the November 2010 Condé Nast Traveler, the central colonial section of Cuenca “doesn't look like a sixteenth-century city that has been preserved; it looks like a city that has been in use since the sixteenth century.” Trillin describes himself as ... [More]

The mounds of reeking garbage on the edge of this settlement 600 miles off Ecuador’s Pacific coast are proof that one species is thriving on the fragile archipelago whose unique wildlife inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution: man. Tiny gray finches, descendants of birds that were... [More]

On a recent day, the man known in Ecuador as the Gringo Chief wore a traditional black smock and a necklace strung with jaguar and wild boar's teeth, perfectly suitable for the Cofan Indian ceremony marking the acquisition of yet another slice of rain forest. With his fellow Cofan listen... [More]

Photographs by Edd Staton Edd Staton (of the eddsaid blog) and I met for lunch at Carbón, the parillada (grill) at the Cuenca Hotel, centrally located on Presidente Borrero between Gran Colombia and Mariscal Lamar. Meeting at noon, we beat the downtown lunch crowd by an hour, so we... [More]

By Mark Blazis Having been a part of 40 expeditions into Amazonia and the Andes and a dozen more into the Galapagos Islands, I was recently invited to be the consulting biologist for a television documentary in Ecuador featuring CSI Miami’s Jorja Fox, Extreme Animal Rescue actor/produc... [More]

My luggage was already overflowing and I needed a new printer anyway, so I left my old printer behind, planning on buying a new one in Cuenca. My friend Greg Madeiros, an expat computer guy, recommended the store CompuFacil. Armed with the address on Remigio Crespo Toral near Avenida Loja, ... [More]

Among the first sights newcomers to Cuenca notice, along with the billowing white clouds, the rolling green hills, and the red-tile roofs, are the big blue buses that spew black diesel fumes into the otherwise colorless alpine air.   Hundreds of them bomb around town, from rou... [More]

By David Shukman On the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, the director of the Darwin Foundation says there is only a decade to avoid an ecological disaster. In a BBC interview, Gabriel Lopez calls for limits on the level of visitors. In 2009, the number of tourists reach... [More]

The Yunguilla Valley is beyond and lower than Girón, so it’s a little warmer and drier, prime orchard country. You take dirt roads off the highway down into the hollows and up into the hills where the properties are measured in acres and tropical fruit trees abound. A few gringos own ... [More]

On the last Sunday of our month in Cuenca, Shirlee and I joined Dave and Chela for an impromptu tour southwest of Cuenca on the road down to Machala and the coast. Our tourguide and driver was Carlos Lara, a young Cuencano who learned his English in the U.K. and has a distinct British accent, whic... [More]

The famous indigenous market in Otavalo, a two-hour drive north of Quito, is the best place to buy Andean art, crafts, textiles, jewelry, and more. But if you’re visiting Ecuador and your trip is limited to Cuenca and environs, you’ll find plenty of places to partake in retail therapy ... [More]

The guide hushed us as we walked through the jungle in our rubber boots. If we were very quiet, he said, we might be able to catch a glimpse of the howler monkey whose howling we had been hearing intermittently from somewhere high in the canopy of the rainforest. This was the third morning o... [More]

Cuenca has a dozen or so museums that will introduce visitors to historic, cultural, ethnographic, and religious aspects of Cuenca and Ecuador and will deepen the experience of residents. Here are four of the best.   You can’t miss the Museo del Sombrero on Calle Larga ne... [More]

[Editor’s Note: This post, by Shirlee Severs, AccessEcuador.com’s photographer and Deke Castleman’s partner, is about a day trip she took from Cuenca to El Cajas National Park.] A couple days before we were scheduled to depart for home, I woke up to what, here in Nevada... [More]

Editor´s note: Edd Staton is a Cuenca resident, writer and community activist. He is author of the Edd Said blog, www.eddsaid.blogspot.com, and writes a column for Cuenca´s afternoon newspaper, La Tarde. My wife and I returned home from the United States Tuesday, and we felt Ecua... [More]

In a newspaper story translated by and posted on this website, the Ecuadorian Minister of Tourism claimed that Cuenca receives approximately 100,000 out-of-town visitors annually. If this is accurate, that averages out to a little less than 300 per night.    Naturally, this do... [More]

[Editor’s Note: The following starts a new series of posts from veteran travel writer Deke Castleman and photographer Shirlee Severs. The blog of Deke and Shirlee’s first two weeks in Ecuador ran on this website in April. This series covers the month they spent in Cuenca last October.]... [More]

The following article by Calvin Trillin appears in the November 2010 edition of Conde Nast Traveler. Trillin, a senior editor at the New Yorker magazine, wrote a cover story for that magazine about Cuenca in 2005. (See www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/09/05/050905fa_fact). "But ... [More]