One couple’s positive experience in Cuenca

This short article is part of “Facelift Ecuador: Share Your Positive Story!“, an initiative to publish positive articles from CuencaHighLife readers to counter international media that often focuses on the negative and sometimes exaggerates it. If you would like to submit your story, click here.

By Marshall and Nadine

We love Cuenca! Our Ecuador journey began six years ago this month, when our research compelled us to visit Cuenca to see if it was a good fit for our lifestyle migration for retirement. We had other locations on the list, but Cuenca checked the most of the retirement demographic boxes. July, 2019 was when we first fell in love with the city and its history, culture, and kind people.

We had both grown up and lived in Texas for many years, and were always enamored of the Latin American culture, specifically because Mexico was always close by. Our trip did not disappoint, and we met with several professional people recommended to help with our transition, including an immigration attorney and container shipper. By the time we returned home and discussed our feelings about immigrating, we decided that Cuenca was to be our new home.

We arrived six weeks before the pandemic, which was enough time for us to secure a wonderful apartment (in which we still live), our visas, cédulas, and a container of our household goods. The pandemic posed some “challenges” that often taught us how to overcome adversity in a new country, but thanks to new friends, namely our kind and helpful Cuencano neighbors and friends, we did fine. Even the serious health challenge that we were faced with six months after our arrival was surmountable because of the kindness of our new community. This “culture of kindness” has been the overarching theme of our time spent here, and we have obtained our permanent visas.

Since a big part of our lives after work and moving to another country was to learn the language and as much about Ecuador as possible, as well as do the slow traveling that we had always wanted to do, we have looked for the positives rather than the negatives. We have learned to slow down, take long walks, be patient, ask questions, and adopt the culture, rather than make comparisons with our former lives. This approach has drastically improved our ease and enjoyment of travel to distant lands that we have always dreamed of experiencing.

So our retirement lifestyle migration to Cuenca has been very successful and exactly what we wanted out of this phase of our lives, thanks in great part to the wonderfully nurturing city that we can now call home!