Travel

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 Jubones Desert, at the south...

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 an inveterate urban walker, taking great pleasure in strolling city...

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 crucial to his thesis, flutter around the dump, which serves...

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 had the place pretty much to...

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, I checked my trusty guía...

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 roughly 5:45 a.m. till 11 p.m. weekdays and 6...

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 reached a record of 173,000, a four-fold...

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 houses and land up...

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,...

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 and souvenir hunting.  

 A great...

[Editor’s Note: This post, by Shirlee Severs, 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, we call a “blue-bird day”: a picture-perfect sky without a cloud in it. And since...