The city that isn’t sunny and why that helps

By Christoph Wackher

Cuenca receives 1,971 hours of sunshine a year. That is less than Milan, which manages 2,302 and is not famous for its weather. It is well under Malaga’s 2,936. Anyone who moved here expecting Mediterranean light has a legitimate grievance.

The interesting part is that it does not matter, and at 2,560 metres elevation on the equator it may be an advantage.

When the sun comes out in Cuenca so do the parasols. (El Mercurio)

Start with what the sunshine figure hides. Cuenca sits within three degrees of the equator, so the sun climbs almost directly overhead at midday, all year. Altitude thins the atmosphere that would otherwise absorb ultraviolet. The combination is why highland Andean populations carry an unusually heavy burden of eye disease — cataract and pterygium are widespread across the region, and the mechanism is straightforward: decades of exposure at an intensity that lower, higher-latitude cities never reach. In a city where people spend real time outdoors, 1,971 hours of moderated sun is not a deficiency. It is a smaller dose of something powerful.

Now let’s look at the number that better describes Cuenca’s climate.

Counting the hours each month when temperature, humidity and wind combine into a comfortable band — call them usable outdoor hours — Cuenca gets 3,415 a year. That is more than Milan (2,541), more than London (2,425), more than Manchester (2,039), and close to Malaga’s 3,569 despite a third less sunshine.

There is a second way to say it. Those usable hours are lost to four things: heat, cold, rain and wind. **Cuenca loses none at all to heat.** Zero hours in the year are too hot to be outside in. Everything it gives up, it gives up to cool evenings — the altitude trade-off every resident already knows about, and a far easier one to dress for.

But the annual total of usable hours is not the entire story either. This is:

Jan 309   Feb 273   Mar 291   Apr 275
May 289   Jun 266   Jul 263   Aug 270
Sep 277   Oct 302   Nov 296   Dec 304

Cuenca’s best month gives 309 usable outdoor hours. Its worst gives 263. The entire year swings by about 15 percent.

Among the 378 cities in the dataset that clear 2,000 usable hours a year, Cuenca ranks second in the world for how little that number varies month to month. Only Bogota is steadier. Its daytime high moves 1.8 C between the warmest and coolest month of the year — 18.3 C in November, 16.5 C in July. London’s moves 14.8. Milan’s moves 22.1.

That is the thing residents describe as eternal spring, and it is the rare local cliche that survives contact with data. What is worth noticing is what the cliche gets wrong. Eternal spring sounds like a claim about warmth. It is really a claim about variance. Cuenca is not warm — 17 to 18 degrees is a cool English June — it simply refuses to change.

And steadiness alone is not the achievement. Plenty of places are steady and unpleasant: Singapore’s daytime high varies by 1.4 C, less than Cuenca’s, and almost nobody would call sitting outside there comfortable for most of the day. What is rare is being steady and pleasant at the same time, and it is almost entirely an Andean and East African speciality. The five steadiest cities that also clear the comfort threshold are Bogota, Cuenca, Medellin, Cali and Queretaro.

Which means the honest pitch for Cuenca’s climate is not the one on the tourist websites. It is not sunny. It is not warm. It is not dramatic. It is reliable — and reliability is the thing that actually determines whether you go for a walk on a random Tuesday in June.

Forecasting here will stay a crapshoot regardless. Sitting in the intertropical convergence zone, in mountains, means the clouds and rain arrive on their own schedule and no model predicts them well. But the temperature does not move, which is why a bad forecast in Cuenca costs you an umbrella rather than a ruined day.

The comparison worth carrying: Miami gets 3,158 sunshine hours to Cuenca’s 1,971 — 60 percent more — and 2,364 usable outdoor hours to Cuenca’s 3,415. More sun, a thousand fewer hours you would actually want to be outside in it.
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Sunshine figures are satellite observations bias-corrected against 219 published weather-station records; outdoor comfort models apparent temperature every half-hour of daylight from temperature, humidity and wind. Method and full data: georank.place/methodology

Christoph Wackher builds GeoRank (georank.place), an open climate and cost-of-living dataset covering 478 cities. Its sunshine figures are satellite observations corrected against 219 published weather-station records, and the underlying data is free to download and check.