Walking the Athens of Ecuador: How Cuenca's Centre Reads as Literature and Stone

Cuenca's colonial centre fits inside about twelve blocks. From Parque Calderón, the central square, you can walk in any direction for ten minutes and either hit the Tomebamba river to the south, the Plaza San Sebastián to the west, the old indigenous market quarter to the north, or the Pumapungo archaeological park to the east. The whole historic centre is small. What it contains, however, is unusually dense: two cathedrals, four major plazas, a dozen churches, a national museum, a contemporary art museum, the largest open-air flower market in the country, and the visible foundations of an Inca city built on a Cañari one.

The tour walks through this in a single thread, and the thread is that Cuenca calls itself the Athens of Ecuador. That label, used by Cuencanos themselves for a hundred and fifty years, refers to the unusual concentration of writers, poets, and elected literary intellectuals the city has produced. The tour treats the historic centre as the visible record of why: the wealth that built the cathedrals also subsidized the salons; the salons produced the writers; the writers became the curators of the museums; the museums anchored the modern centre.

Parque Calderón and the founders

The first stop is Parque Calderón itself, the central plaza of the colonial grid. The square is named for Abdón Calderón, an independence-era soldier who died young at the Battle of Pichincha in 1822, but the plaza is older than his name. The Spanish laid it out in 1557, four years after the founding of Cuenca on the ruins of the Inca city of Tomebamba. The four sides of the plaza hold the four powers of colonial Andean urbanism: religion, civic administration, the bishop's palace, and the merchant houses. The cathedrals occupy the eastern side. The municipal building occupies the northern side. The plaza itself was originally a dirt commons and is now a planted park with araucaria trees, a small fountain, and a bandstand. Most of Cuenca's literary salons of the late nineteenth century met within two blocks of this square.

The two cathedrals

Stops two and three are the two cathedrals on the plaza's eastern side, separated by about thirty metres of garden. The Old Cathedral was finished in 1567 and served as the parish church for three hundred years. It is small, Mudejar-influenced, and dark inside. It is now a museum of religious art. The New Cathedral, formally the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, was begun in 1885 and substantially finished by 1975. Its scale is the donor record of a town that wanted to be a small European cathedral city: a capacity for ten thousand, three central blue-tiled domes, an interior with imported marble flooring, and two bell towers that were never completed because the original engineering calculations did not account for the weight. The two cathedrals tell the same story across three centuries: a colonial parish becomes a republican city ambitious enough to commission a German-influenced Romanesque revival pile, and finishes it ninety years later because the funding came in waves.

The market quarter

Stops four through six move from the religious centre to the household economy. The flower market on the Plaza de las Flores is the oldest continuous market of its kind in Ecuador; women have sold flowers in that arcade since at least the early colonial period, and the chola cuencana vendors wear the distinctive embroidered blouse, white wool skirt, and straw hat that has become the unofficial uniform of the regional traditional dress. The Plaza San Francisco, three blocks west, holds the artisanal craft market. The Mercado 10 de Agosto, one block farther, is the daily food market: hominy, plantain, cuy on a spit, fresh chocolate, the soup called locro de papa. The three plazas, taken in sequence, are the visible record of how household economy and ceremonial economy braided in the colonial city.

The wealth that paid for the writers

Stop seven, the Museo Pumapungo or, on some routings, the Museo de Arte Moderno, is the institutional climax of the tour. The Museo Pumapungo, run by the Central Bank, holds the country's most complete collection of pre-Columbian objects from the southern Andes. The Museo de Arte Moderno, three blocks west of San Sebastián, was founded in 1981 by a circle of Cuencano writers and artists, and it now anchors the city's biennial contemporary art exhibition, which is one of the major art events in Andean South America. Either way, the message of the stop is the same: the wealth that paid for the cathedrals continued, in the twentieth century, to pay for institutions that turned the city's literary self-image into a visible cultural infrastructure.

The river that defines everything

Stops eight and nine, the Plaza San Sebastián and the Barranco cliff, are where the tour reaches the geographic spine of the city. The Tomebamba river runs east to west three blocks south of Parque Calderón, and the Barranco is the steep bluff on which the colonial city's wealthier town houses were built. The view from the Barranco down to the river was the favourite literary subject of nineteenth-century Cuencano poets. The houses on the bluff have iron balconies, whitewashed walls, and tile roofs. They look out over the Tomebamba toward the southern suburbs and, in the distance, the foothills of the Cajas national park.

The Cañari and Inca substrate

The last stops, Todos Santos and the Pumapungo archaeological site, sit at the eastern end of the historic centre and complete the chronology by going underneath the colonial layer. Pumapungo was the Inca administrative centre of Tomebamba, the southern capital of the Inca empire under Huayna Capac in the late fifteenth century. Beneath it lies the Cañari city the Inca conquered. The Spanish, in 1557, built their colonial Cuenca on top of both layers, dismantling the Inca stone to make foundations for the Spanish grid. The terraced ruins at Pumapungo, excavated in the twentieth century, are what survived. From them, looking back across the Tomebamba into the colonial centre, the full vertical history of the site is visible in one sweep.

The tour is, in that sense, an argument. The literary tradition that calls Cuenca the Athens of Ecuador is the surface phenomenon of a city built on three substrates: a Cañari one, an Inca one, and a colonial Spanish one, each layered on top of the last and each visible in the centre's plan. The cathedrals on Parque Calderón are the patrons; the plazas around them are the daily economy; the museums on the eastern and western edges are the cultural institutions the writers built; the river is the spine that ties everything together. Walk it once, then read any nineteenth-century Cuencano poem, and the geography of the verses will make sense.