Expat Cities

Ecuador is becoming known for the number of expats that are moving here, and we spent some time in two of their favorite communities. We wanted to visit both these cities with high expat populations to see what it was all about, not that we plan on moving from Canada, as the more we travel the better Canada becomes as a country!

First stop was Salinas, a beach resort town with condos and apartments and although no all inclusives, it does have a nice beach, tourist hotels and restaurants. Mostly rich Ecuadorians come here with their families, but there was a smattering of us snowbird types as well.

Beach in Salinas

 We lounged on the beach and went to the local expat watering hole for St Paddy's Day green beer, green margaritas and that basic Irish standby of boiled potatoes, boiled cabbage, carrots, and roast beef. Just like growing up on the farm!

We had a good evening, visiting with a couple of fellows from Vancouver who are in Salinas looking for property. It turned out that I knew the one fellow's daughter through work and had also dealt with him in some past business issues in 1990. Small world!

On to Cuenca, touted as one of the best places in the world to retire. I can see why people chose Cuenca and if I was looking to move to South America it would be one of my top choices of the areas we have been to. Cuenca is a very colonial and European style city. Clean and prosperous, even the surrounding farms and villages seem to be mostly prosperous with painted buildings and clean streets. The gringo population seems to be concentrated in the central, historic part of the city with a few restaurants and bars owned by expats and catering to gringo tastes.

Cuenca

 Through sponsorship from the Ministry of Culture there were a number of free cultural events in Cuenca while we were there. We managed to attend a concert by the Cuenca Symphony, director was from Spain, that played a symphony of movie songs from Jaws, West Side Story, Indiana Jones, The Pink Panther, etc. It was my first and only symphony and I rather enjoyed it. Then later that week we attended a Blue Grass concert by a three piece group of Americans now from Mexico City. While the girls quite liked this one I was a bit disappointed, mainly because I wanted to hear some Charlie Daniels and they played mostly Bill Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs music.

Cuenca has the most elegant cathedral we have visited in South America. One lady we met compared it to the cathedral in the Vatican in Rome. It is huge with stained glass windows of various religious figures, high blue domed towers and enough gold plating on the interior to fill a good size treasure house. Even an agnostic like me was impressed!

Cathedral

 We spent a day at Ingapirca, ancient ruins of both Canari and Inca. The Canari were a pre-Inca civilization that also had established religious and astrological sites in parts of Ecuador. A matriarchal society that took the moon as their main Goddess, they had established a calendar of thirteen months that tracked the 28 changes of the moon through the month. Conquered by the Inca and absorbed into Inca culture the site was changed to the Inca religion of sun worship. In this instance they had established a sun wall that had four altars set at precise locations. As the earth rotated around the sun, sunlight coming through specific holes in the roof of the building would entirely illuminate each one of the altars on days corresponding to the winter and summer solstices, spring and fall equinoxes.

Canari Calendar

Sun Temple, Ingapirca

 Today the Canari dominate the farm land and villages in the highlands around Cuenca, while the Inca are mostly extinct.

The high valleys around Cuenca are full of farms and the plowed fields have soils that look black and rich. They grow a number of different crops and vegetables and there are a lot of dairy cows. Farming here is not an easy way to make a living. The ground, while fertile, is steep and no machinery is used. Plowing is often done with a team of oxen and a wooden plow or the extended family coming over with shovels and hoes.

Oxen with wooden plow

 We stayed at the Casa Ordenez in Cuenca, an old family home that has been converted into a B&B. The B&B is family run and absolutely fantastic. We had a semi-private living room with our pick of 2000 pirated DVDs so spent some time catching up on movies.