Perpetual Spring! Ha! Charlie Larga’s Field Guide to Life in Cuenca

When I first came to Cuenca, I made the mistake of asking people what the summers were like.

The puzzled looks I got were almost as sharp as when I once asked a taxi driver if he’d ever considered raising his fares. “Summer?” they said, as if I’d asked what they thought of Martian winters.

Cuenca doesn’t have summer or winter. It has stretches of rain, spells of sun, and the occasional cold snap when you find yourself wearing an alpaca hoodie indoors. If you mention summer, Cuencanos assume you’re talking about somewhere else like Miami, Madrid, or maybe the imaginary England they know from BBC news clips.

People often call Cuenca “the land of eternal springtime,” which sounds poetic until you ask what spring actually means. There are at least three answers, none of them quite the same.

First, there’s Chaucer’s spring in medieval England. The “shoures soote” of April were supposed to inspire pilgrimages, but what they mostly inspired was chilblains, muddy boots, and the hope that your horse didn’t sink to its knees in a ditch. Spring meant rain dripping through thatched roofs and trees that still looked dead until you squinted hard enough to imagine a bud or two. Romantic? Only if you were writing in Middle English.

Then there’s Florida’s spring, which is really just summer with better parking. By March, the sun is already too hot to put the roof down on your convertible. I remember once trying it anyway, thinking I’d enjoy a nice breeze, and ended up with a face the color of a boiled lobster before I reached the next set of traffic lights on US 41. The only people who call it spring are the spring-breakers, convinced that six margaritas count as hydration.

And finally there’s Cuenca’s eternal springtime. Not Chaucer’s mud, not Florida’s lobster boil, but something in between. A drizzle that turns into sunshine, which turns into hailstones the size of marbles, all before you’ve finished your empanada. Eternal springtime here means never being entirely sure whether to carry an umbrella, a sweater, or a sombrero, so the end result is that you carry all three and look like a badly packed pilgrim progressing through the suburbs.

I once tried to explain this to a Cuencano friend. “You know, summer — the warm part of the year.” He frowned and said, “Ah, you mean mediodía?” That’s midday, not a season, but to him it was the only “warm part of the year” worth naming. Another time, at a café, I heard an expat insist that Cuenca really did have summer, it was just hiding between the rains.

And yet, right now, in what North Americans call August, you notice something shifting in the city. The restaurants are busier, the plazas livelier, the flights arriving in Quito and Guayaquil a little more crowded.

Families come back from New Jersey or Queens to visit grandparents, their children tripping over common Spanish words the way I still trip over the bus schedules. You see a few backpacks with Canadian flags sewn on to prove that they are not USians, their owners convinced that Ecuador must be warm everywhere in August.

I once overheard a couple in Parque Calderón arguing whether they’d taken the wrong plane, because they’d packed nothing but shorts and found themselves shivering in the Andean drizzle.

Locals, meanwhile, don’t label this season at all. It’s just August, a month like any other, except perhaps for more relatives under the same roof and more traffic in El Centro.

Schools have their own rhythms too, though we appear to be in back-to-school season in August judging by the displays of pencils and crayons in Coral. Fiestas also have their own dates, and the weather remains as unpredictable as ever. If there’s a “season,” at all it’s the season of visitors, brief but recognizable.

So when someone here asks why the streets seem to be blooming with pedestrians, I just tell them it’s our summer — not Cuenca’s, but the borrowed summer season of everyone in the northern hemisphere. A season that doesn’t exist here, but is flown in.

And in Cuenca, to tell the truth, the only truly reliable seasons are Construction and Festival.