The hook
An Andean colonial city at 2,560 m that one well-travelled visitor ranked third-best in the world behind Buenos Aires and Kyoto — with a national park of glacial lakes and páramo starting forty minutes up the road.
01Why it's worth it
Cuenca is the counterargument to treating Ecuador as Quito plus the Galápagos. It is a UNESCO-listed colonial centre that still functions as a city rather than a preserved quarter: red-tiled roofs, four rivers running through it, the blue-domed Catedral Nueva, and a grid small enough to cross on foot. The Museo Pumapungo sits on genuine Cañari and Inca foundations, so the pre-colonial layer is physically underneath the Spanish one rather than described in a caption, and the ruins of Ingapirca — Ecuador's most significant Inca site — are a couple of hours north.
This is also where Panama hats are actually woven, a fact that survives the name. The trade museums and workshops in town are among the more honest craft experiences in the region because the industry is still working rather than reenacted.
El Cajas National Park is the reason to stay longer. Half an hour west, the road climbs to over 4,000 m into páramo — treeless, wet, cold, and pocked with several hundred glacial lakes. The polylepis woodland in the sheltered hollows is a genuinely strange thing to walk through: gnarled, papery-barked trees at an altitude where trees should not be. Condors are present. The bus between Cuenca and Guayaquil crosses it, which makes one of South America's more dramatic ordinary bus rides.
02How to experience it
Fly in, or take the Guayaquil bus for the Cajas crossing. Give the old town two days on foot, and El Cajas a full day with a guide or a marked route — the páramo is easy to get lost in and the weather turns fast. Ingapirca is a day trip. Altitude is real: arrive gently.
The honest note
Ecuador's security situation has deteriorated and Cuenca is not exempt. The most measured account comes from an Ecuadorian answering how dangerous the country actually is: the Galápagos is safest because "some street thug won't even be able to afford traveling there," and then — "Cuenca is pretty safe too but you always need to be on the lookout for motorcycles." That is a specific warning, not a general one: motorcycle snatch thefts are the pattern. Keep your phone away from the street side of the pavement.
More broadly, a commenter married into a Cuencan family explained the wider shift as a consequence of Ecuador's dollarised economy and a large recent influx of migrants and asylum seekers. Conditions here have changed materially since the mid-2010s, and older trip reports should be read with that in mind.
The highlands will ruin your plans, cheerfully. Two separate accounts on record involve rain, failed buses and long walks in the wrong direction near Cuenca — one traveller ended up walking five miles along a highway in the rain looking, by their own description, "like a giant trash bag with my ripped up poncho," before a stranger paid their bus fare. That is the texture of highland travel here: fine, but not punctual.
The country also has a history of national strikes shutting road transport for days at a time; one traveller in 2019 spent days hitching to reach Cuenca and then could not leave. Worth knowing if your flight out is tight.
From the locals
The strongest endorsement is a ranking, and the company it keeps is the point. Asked for their favourite city anywhere, one traveller put Buenos Aires first for "the city's love for fun," added that "Kyoto is a close second" — and then: "Cuenca, ecuador is third."
Someone recommending Ecuador as the best Latin American country for nature separated the two cities by what each is actually good at: "Quito has some great colonial architecture, and Cuenca has some cool Incan-era architecture as well as a great museum." They rated the whole country "definitely one of the coolest places I've been."