Blind watchmakers and Rolecks in El Centro: Charlie Larga’s Field Guide to Life in Cuenca

You can buy a Rolex wristwatch in downtown Cuenca. At least, that’s what the dial insists. The word ROLEX appears neatly below the little crown logo, though the finish suggests something more Guangzhou than Geneva.

Buy one for a fraction less than $50 including IVA and for a little while, you can feel like you’re running a hedge fund instead of running for the bus, until you notice that the date never advances, the gold plating rubs off, and the bracelet breaks.

Sean Connery as James Bond had his Rolex Submariner reference 6538 customized by Q Branch to shoot lasers and defuse bombs, but in Cuenca, the only trick your Rolecks will perform is turning your wrist green.

That’s the watch game in 2025: illusion layered on nostalgia for a time when having an accurate watch meant something, overlaying a three-dollar quartz movement. Most people these days just check the time or set alarms on their phones unless they are students sitting exams in halls where cell phones are interdicted on pain of disqualification.

Watches, for ordinary mortals, are ornaments, awkward nuisances at airport security, and sometimes adding an elegant touch to a long-sleeve shirt cuff. Yet the market for “looks expensive” watches thrives and thirty to eighty dollars buys you something that looks plausibly like a timepiece when viewed on a security camera.

The real secret is that a fifty-dollar watch may cost under ten to make. The movement itself is often worth less than a bus ride. The rest is marketing and mark-up. When an online seller promises “luxury without the price,” both halves of the phrase are misleading.

There are three tribes of the wrist. First, the fashion watches like Fossil and Tommy Hilfiger, and the shiny things you see in airport duty-free. They tell the time, yes, but mostly they remind you that advertising agencies still have jobs.

Then there are the homages, the “rolecks”, copies of Submariners and Speedmasters. Invicta or OLEVS—all offering imitations that won’t in the slightest impress a bona fide connoisseur of watchmaking, but will give you something to fiddle with at a café table.

Finally, there are the workhorses: Casio, Timex, Seiko, and Citizen—the last of which makes Eco-Drive watches that quietly sip sunlight and never need a replacement battery. These brands don’t pretend to be Rolex. They just run,  sometimes for decades, and sometimes, field research has shown, after being dropped on the floor of a Cuenca bus and trodden on.

So if you want to look expensive, El Centro can help, but if you want a watch that lasts longer than your umbrella, go Japanese and if you really want a Rolex then bring a jeweler’s loupe when you shop on Avenida Mariscal Sucre. Under magnification the coronet on the dial may look less like a crown and more like a yellow pitahaya, but as the vendor will say with a grin, “¡Mire, originalito, patrón!”

Or, if you’d rather skip the drama, just buy a Citizen Eco-Drive from Tiendamia or Amazon and hang it up on a banana stand near the window so that the morning sun can wind it up while you are still sleeping.