It seemed like such a good idea at the time: My husband Barry and I would visit Cuenca, a UNESCO World Heritage city in the south of Ecuador, staying in a private home while en route to my nephew’s wedding in Lima, Peru.
We belong to a home-exchange organization, and an American who owns a condo in Cuenca had stayed at our Guanajuato city home a year ago while we were in California. Now, it was our turn to stay in his home.
I’m always curious about other international cities in which U.S. citizens retire. What would it be like had we chosen this town or that one instead of Guanajuato? Cuenca — along with Cusco, Peru and Medellín, Colombia, to name a couple of other South American cities — is a frequent retiree choice. In fact, Cuenca is so popular with expats that I thought it might be Ecuador’s answer to Mexico’s popular San Miguel de Allende.
Barry and I are so smitten with Guanajuato, though, that it’s hard to find other cities that come close. We love the friendly, warmhearted Mexican people. We love color, and Guanajuato is the most vibrant city we’ve ever seen, with houses of every color imaginable — turquoise, magenta, orange and on and on.
The city’s pedestrianized areas, with much of the traffic underground, are ideal for us. Plus, the winding streets force the aboveground traffic to go slowly.
We can hike right from our front door, but when we want to range further afield, we love the fact that we can take a plush bus to other nearby beautiful cities like Querétaro, San Luis Potosí and Aguascalientes within half a day. Similarly, we can fly to Puerto Vallarta or Cancun, where we can visit Maya ruins dotted around the Yucatán Peninsula, in an hour.
Sixth, León’s international airport can fly us direct to Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Chicago, Los Angeles and Tijuana, among other cities. It’s hard to top that!
Our first hint that Cuenca might not be like San Miguel de Allende was just getting there. We flew from Mexico City overnight to Quito, Ecuador’s capital, where we stayed for a few days, and then flew directly to Cuenca. Quito is a long way from the United States or Canada, and Cuenca is even more remote.
Unfortunately, Cuenca didn’t meet our expectations, although we enjoyed a couple of its assets: a river with tree-lined paths on both sides, and the city’s hot springs, one of my favorites in the world, with pools of different temperatures and a eucalyptus-flavored steam room.
Still, Cuenca, with a population of over 600,000, is much larger and busier than we realized. Drivers honked a lot, while buses seemed to careen down the city’s narrow streets, their fenders veering into the sidewalks, making even me — famous for my casual attitude towards oncoming traffic — shudder with anxiety.
Nor is Cuenca’s chronic rain like Mexico’s “monsoon” season, where a huge violent thunderstorm will last for a couple of hours and then clear the air. Cuenca’s spring weather is more like the U.S. Pacific Northwest: persistently damp and chilly.
Ecuador is one of four Latin American countries that Barry and I have visited in the last ten years. The others were Panama, Colombia and Peru.
Panama
A small and easily navigable country, Panama has many hillside towns which, though charming, are too small or too far from an international airport to work for me. Boquete, for example, a popular coffee town in the north of the country, is seven hours from Panama City. Also, as lovers of ruins, we were disappointed that the only archaeological sites we saw were right in Panama City.
Finally, Panama is heavily influenced by U.S. culture due to the construction of the Panama Canal; we want to live in a culture that feels significantly different from the United States.
Colombia
Colombia is our favorite of the four Latin American countries we’ve visited, and Medellín is the city we’d probably have picked if we’d moved. It’s a fascinating city with a once-traumatic history and creative, award-winning transit solutions to isolated, marginalized communities high in the hills around the city. We liked Medellín, but had to take taxis and Ubers everywhere, whereas we much prefer to walk as we can in Guanajuato.
We were charmed by the Pueblos Patrimonios (Heritage Towns), Colombia’s equivalent to Mexico’s Pueblos Mágicos, especially the nearby coffee towns of Jardín and Jerico, part of the state of Antioquia. But with a population of 2.4 million, Medellín is way too big and sprawling for us.
Perú
Our trip for my nephew’s wedding was not our first time in Peru. In 1985, Lima was a much smaller city, but today, its exhausting traffic makes that of Mexico City look like a small town.
Because we hiked the four-day Inca trail to Machu Picchu in the 1980s, we decided to forego Cusco and the nearby Sacred Valley region this time around. As my nephew’s father-in-law said to me, “Don’t worry about going to Machu Picchu if you’ve already been. The only thing that has changed there since 1985 is the number of tourists.” Indeed, my sisters said the crowds were overwhelming.
If we’d moved to Peru, we might have picked Cusco to live, but my sisters told us that the traffic there is also horrendous. Plus, there’s the issue of flights to Lima. Several flights my family members had booked were delayed or cancelled outright, making connections very tenuous.
For Barry and me, the other Latin American countries we’ve seen, interesting as they are, simply don’t meet our criteria. Still, I recommend that any foreign resident living in Mexico and interested in Latin America visit; it’s a much faster hop from Mexico City to any of these South and Central American capitals than from the U.S.
As Mexico News Daily readers know, Mexico has it all. Kind-hearted people, culture, archaeology, access — you name it. I’m forever grateful we found a home for ourselves in this magical country.
Louisa Rogers and her husband Barry Evans divide their lives between Guanajuato and Eureka, on California’s North Coast. Louisa writes articles and essays about expat life, Mexico, travel, physical and psychological health, retirement and spirituality. Her recent articles are available on her website, authory.com/LouisaRogers
