The Best City in South America?

After a few days in Guayaquil sorting out our Galápagos trip and replacing things after our bag was stolen, we moved back up into the mountains. The city we chose for Jo's birthday was Cuenca - an old colonial city dating back to 1557.

The New Cathedral in Cuenca

We found the UNESCO-listed centre to be very beautiful, with plenty of old buildings, churches, cathedrals and plazas. The full name of the city is Santa Ana de los Cuatro Ríos de Cuenca, as it is built around four rivers. This really added to the charm of the place - they were fast flowing and lined with trees and clean banks of grass.

One of Cuenca's four rivers

The route between Guayaquil and Cuenca passes the Cajas National Park. On the way there, we couldn't see any of it as fog limited our visibility to a few metres at most. It also limited our driver's visibility, but that didn't stop him. We decided to return to the park a few days later and had been recommended a day hike to do. It was our first experience of the páramo - high altitude grassland. There were a surprising amount of flower and plant species in a seemingly invariable landscape. Our trail took us to the top of a very steep mountain, eschewing the usual switchbacks and leaving us to almost climb up some parts. The views at the top of the many surrounding lakes made it worth it though.

Lake Toreadora in El Cajas National Park

On Jo's birthday we went for a day out at the zoo. We'd heard good things about it and it wasn't like a normal zoo. Instead of having free reign to go wherever you wanted, it was more like a hike on a predetermined route up a hill around the large animal pens. It was great seeing spectacled bears climbing trees that didn't appear big enough to support them, pumas, ocelots and lion cubs, even if they weren't in the wild. We also went out to one of Ecuador's most famous restaurants - Tiesto's - for an excellent tasting menu with Chilean wine. We weren't brave enough yet to try the Ecuadorian variant. Another treat was staying for a few days in a hotel in one of the historic buildings in the city centre.

A spectacled bear high up in a tree

Another site of note near (-ish) to Cuenca are the Inca ruins at Ingapirca. The Inca empire had extended all the way through Ecuador, but many sites had been destroyed during their civil war, and more after that to prevent them falling into Spanish hands. Ingapirca is the largest site in Ecuador and, although not as extensive as those in Perú, still showed off the amazing Inca architecture. We also enjoyed seeing an 'Inca Face' appearing in the rocks in a nearby cliff.

The Inca Face

To answer the question as to whether Cuenca is the best city in South America - well, it's hard to say. It's certainly one of our favourites, alongside Arequipa in Perú and Sucre in Bolivia. Obviously, though, everywhere is different and we have so much more to explore - starting with the Galápagos Islands, our next destination.