A bunch of rum-soaked herbs struck me in the face. Tobacco smoke and Quechua incantations warbled through the air as a five-foot-nothing Indigenous woman lashed me again with her vegetable whip. This was not an act of punishment, but a cure for fever.
My Spanish teacher, Sol, assured me that paracetamol could not deal with the root cause of my illness – evil spirits – so I found myself in the Santuario Mariano del Carmen, a monastery and pilgrimage centre in the heart of Cuenca in Ecuador. The final part of my healing was to have an egg rubbed over my body to draw out the evil spirits and their mischief.
To prevent a relapse, I was given a bracelet with an icon of the Virgin Mary, coloured red by an Indigenous belief that this warded off evil. Cuenca often felt like this rite; a seamless tapestry of contradictions between the Andean world and the European culture brought by the Conquistadors.
Just beyond a courtyard home to the invisible world of Andean spirits, is a wonderfully ornate city, rightly recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Cuenca is nice in the same way that Barcelona or Toulouse are nice. It is a rambling maze of cobbled streets, columned porticoes and geranium-adorned balconies. Nothing is purely functional; lamposts are wrought in baroque fancy or eaves in hues of gold leaf.
As if the architecture seeps into the Cuencano consciousness, the old ways reign. Walking behind parading nuns or poncho-clad Quechua speakers quickly becomes routine. They are also a people allergic to using the familiar tú form of ‘you’, preferring the more haughty usted. Cuenca’s most famous export is familiar to all, but under a different name. The ‘Panama Hat’ was conceived here under the name Montecristi, a fact that citizens do not tire of reminding visitors! As an icon of the city, this emblem of refined holidaymakers is wholly appropriate.
The diadem that crowns the skyline of Cuenca is its magnificent Cathedral, topped with ultramarine blue domes like a lighthouse above the swell of the streets. Its quirk of the front two towers being shorter than the original plans is hard to ignore once you are aware of it, but it only endears the building to its visitors. The cathedral’s terrace offers panoramas of the spires and tiled roofs of Cuenca tapering up to the rugged Las Cajas National Park. These mountains, up to 4,400m tall, home to pumas, condors and spectacled bears, are an easy day-trip away from the architectural majesty of Cuenca. South America’s mountain world has no shortage of superlatives, but it is rarely comfortable. That changes in Cuenca.
Adjacent to the Cathedral and the verdant Plaza Calderon where well-heeled locals read newspapers and play chess, is the outline of a Canari street. A settlement founded by those conquered by the Incas just decades before the Spanish arrived whispers from beneath the colonial-era cobbles. The city is a layer cake of planted cities. The Incas, under Tupac Yupanqui, demolished the ancient Canari city of Guapondelig, and built a city in the image of Cusco, his capital. Like the original, it was shaped like a puma, and it had a similar mountain backdrop, though without the shivering cold nights. Called Tomebamba, it was like an Inca Constantinople, a new Rome built in a more useful and clement place than the original capital, as well as a potent reminder of Incan power to the conquered Canari.
Most of Tomebamba’s stones have vanished into modern Cuenca, but the foundations of a palace still stand at Museo Puma Pungo, the probable birthplace of the last true Inca Emperor, Huayna Capac. Llamas graze ruin-adorned hillsides overlooking a botanical garden of Andean plants, as if so much of what is distinctive about South America were concentrated in a single vista. That it happened to be off the Calle Larga, a street home to international cuisine and colonial houses like Museo Municipal Remigio Crespo Toral is just pure Cuenca. This genre-spanning attraction also featured real shrunken heads, and even a shrunken sloth with an expression of bemusement at facing eternity as a furry balloon.
Intrigued by the long-vanished Canari that sleep beneath Cuenca’s stones, I journeyed to Ingapirca, somewhat grandly called ‘Ecuador’s Machu Picchu’, an hour beyond Cuenca. Unique curving walls and silo-like graves around a massive Inca structure planted upon their temple attested to the drama of this long-forgotten conquest. I pondered their worship of the moon over the sun, and how something of Hecate and the nocturnal mysteries hung over this Inca statement piece studded with hallucinogenic flowers, on the rooftop bar of the five-star Itza Hotel Boutique, overlooking Cuenca.
For all of its colonial splendour and evocative memorials to the pre-Hispanic past, my favourite place in Cuenca was the River Tomebamba. Often, the two worlds of South America, the indigenous and the Spanish feel curdled. Left-behind mountain towns are commonly veiled in gloom and memory of the Incas’ doom, while other modern cities work to bury the Andean past by imitating the West. Here though, banks of swaying willow trees, balconied colonial mansions and picnicking couples flank an archetypal Andean torrent of singing white water. Cuenca takes the continent’s extremities and places them at the heart of a thriving city.
Cuenca is not directly connected to the wider world. Visitors will need to fly into international hubs like Quito, Lima, Bogota or Medellin and take a connecting flight to Mariscal Lamar Airport.
