The 10 de Agosto market at the top end of Calle Larga in Cuenca has an upstairs juice bar, and according to one longtime local columnist, you'll see more genuine life in an hour there than any guidebook can offer. A man counting out coins for a coffee. A woman carrying a live chicken home in a transparent bag. A café owner who remembers your order — and maybe your name, complete with a respectful 'señor' attached. That's the Cuenca worth writing about, he argues, rather than the polished version that shows up in public-relations copy.
The piece, a reflection on why the author writes, borrows its frame from George Orwell's famous essay on the same subject. But the real value for travellers is the picture it paints of Ecuador's third city: a place where an almuerzo (set lunch) can be gloriously uneven — superb soup, adequate main, and a small pink dessert cube of mystery origin — and where a three-dollar-fifty lunch doesn't appear by magic but through economic workings that would puzzle most visitors from the United States.
That last point matters if you're planning a stay in Cuenca, home to a large community of North American expats. Cheap restaurant meals and inexpensive café culture are real, but they exist inside a functioning local economy. The columnist's gentle reminder: a café is a business, not a public bench. Tip and spend like you're somewhere people work for a living, because you are.
Cuenca itself rewards exactly the kind of slow, observational travel the column describes. It's a UNESCO-listed colonial city in the southern Ecuadorean Andes, known for its red-tiled roofs, riverfront walks along the Tomebamba, flower market, and a cafe scene strong enough that a regular customer becomes a familiar face. Sitting still — in a market juice bar, at a corner café — is genuinely one of the best things you can do here. The city unfolds in small scenes rather than grand monuments.
Who is this for? Travellers who like their destinations unvarnished. If you want the version of Cuenca from a brochure, it exists. But the more interesting version costs the price of a fresh juice and an hour of your morning, upstairs in a market, watching a city go about its business. And that, as the columnist might say, is true — which is more than can be said for most PR.
