welcome back to our channel we're eric and sarah and we've been traveling through ecuador for the
last three months so be sure to subscribe if you want to see more of ecuador and more of our faces
we're currently in cuenca ecuador before we even came to ecuador we've been on some expat
pages and seriously all they ever talk about is cuenca cuenca cuenca cuenca everyone is obsessed
even ecuadorians say it's their favorite city in ecuador and to be completely honest we were
kind of hoping it'd be overrated but now we've been here for two weeks and we understand the
obsession because this place is amazing so we're going to be showing you around and why everyone
loves cuenca ecuador so much cuenca is located in the heart of the andean mountains at over 2 500
meters above sea level to get here from guayaquil we had to take a four and a half hour bus ride up
through the mountains it was absolutely gorgeous we went above the clouds through the cajas
national park and it was just absolutely stunning coming up into the mountains to get to cuenca
before colonization cuenca was the second most important city in the incan empire next to cusco
peru it was founded in 1577 by the spanish and named santa ana de los rios de cuenca
because it was built around four different rivers
nowadays with a population of over 580 000 people cuenca is best known for its
cobblestone streets historical architecture and beautiful cathedral with three distinct cupolas
so cuenco was actually named a world historical site in 1999 and it has this beautiful historical
downtown center with cobblestone streets and old churches and all these kind of beautiful things
that's where we're going to be spending the majority of our video today to show you what
that part is like because that's where most people come to visit when they come to cuenca
and the first thing we're going to do is we're actually going to go
climb the giant cathedral that's right behind us
we've been in cuenca for over two weeks and we haven't gone to this
cathedral yet we were saving it just to show you guys so we are so excited
all right two dollars each to climb up all the stairs and we're on our way
nice nice spiral staircase
it's really deceiving because you can't really see how high you are
when you're climbing up so it feels like we've been climbing for a while
and you just keep going round wow it's so beautiful watch out
that's so gorgeous this is so beautiful
that was scarier what happened i let off the sensors if you come don't stand
with your arms over this thing because they're an alarm goes off learn that the hard way
so this cathedral is so beautiful it's definitely worth coming here we're kind of hoping we'd be
able to walk around more at the top there's only a little bit of a small area but the
views are really beautiful and you can overlook the beautiful park that's right down below here
one of my personal favorite things about cuenca is just all the beautiful flowers and plants
everywhere there's always like hanging baskets everywhere lots of gardens and there's even a
huge flower and plant market with really cheap cut flowers i love it it's awesome
now that we've done the more touristy things that everybody does we wanted to show you
something that not everybody would do but definitely should do when they come to cuenca
hi so this is the market 10 de agosto it has so much stuff there's a whole grain section over here
there's a whole area of produce there's a meat section upstairs there's a ton of restaurants
and other vegetables and things this place literally has everything you can need it's
really awesome but now for the real reason we came to the market today eric's going to get a limpia
do you want to tell us what that is eric so a limpia is basically an ancient andean tradition
and ceremony for cleansing uh the physical and spiritual energy so today we're gonna
check it out we've seen this already like a couple times like just when we came to
this market throughout the week but we've been very interested and i'm gonna get one
all right now that we left the loud area tell us your thoughts how's that experience man that
was so crazy like she was just like smacking me around with these herbs at first and kind of like
settled me down i guess and then she cracked an egg into some water and did like a reading
for me and she told me that i was like kind of like nervous and cold actually she said which
is funny because that's kind of exactly what i was thinking about when i when we first like came here
this morning but how just like i felt a little bit jittery and almost like nervous and she's just
like she could kind of tell from the egg i guess which is just crazy i've never really like had
a reading like that before um and yeah and then she started like spraying me with all this stuff
and it was really nice actually like all the nice smells and uh some of them were
quite strong and pungent uh work i i think it was like some like tobacco water of sorts
yeah that's right there was a lot of different smells going around and i think i'm just gonna be
smelling that for the rest of the day to be honest
the massage part felt really good as well but it was a little intense like i would say if you have
any sort of like head problems i don't know how great it would be she just really like crank my
neck i thought she was going to kill me i wanted your face is so funny yeah i'm sure i'm sure wow
and the a limpia i got my my spiritual and physical energy cleansed
it's finally sunny here it's been raining so much when we're in cuenca we've had
bad luck with weather in general i feel like but man the sun is so nice
what's awesome about cuenca is that even though it's situated in the mountains the historical
center is all flat which makes it very walkable exactly but if you don't feel like walking or
you need to get somewhere fast there is an awesome train it's coming here it comes
big close-up i don't think that oh that does open let's go
look out this way what's awesome is that for us it only costs one dollar per person to get on this
train and we can ride it for 40 minutes so we'll probably just hop back on afterwards and just take
it all the way up but if you live here you can actually buy a card and it's only like 30 cents
per ride so it's pretty cool pretty cool form of transportation that was quick very quick there we
good go go
man i just love how sunny it is oh it's so nice it's been way too long okay so this area of town
is very interesting because there's just so many shops and it feels like every street is dedicated
to one type of shop literally there's a whole street with electronic stores and then a whole
other street with construction equipment and then an entire other street with i don't know
furniture can't think about anything right now but it's so funny because it it seems
like competitively it wouldn't do well but it's probably so nice for people that live here because
you just go to your one street and that's where all the stuff you need is it's awesome
so this is a prime example of what sarah was just talking about literally all the stores that we're
walking across right now are all hairdressers yeah there's one they're all barber shops there's
two a second barber shop a tattoo shop in the middle that's cool
here's another one and then here's yeah here's the third here's a third barbershop we probably
already passed like three or four back there too this is so funny car parts power parts car parts
more car parts other car parts down there
other cars it's awesome all of it oh what five parts
what are the chances that was another car parts oh what is this gonna be
what carpets what i find really awesome about cuenca is that it's always bustling there's always
people on the street kind of going out to different markets going to the stores and
it's actually pretty nice to be in a city for once we've been basically on the coast our whole time
in ecuador so all these small towns we're kind of starting to get old so it's been nice to be in
a couple of cities for the past couple times but yeah anyways cuenca is just amazing so refreshing
so we're now at the kind of artisanal market this one has all kind of handcrafted goods there's
different kind of fabric bags some maybe a little bit clothing but mostly wooden things or all these
handmade things so we're gonna go explore around here today we only travel with a carry-on so we
can't really buy anything but we still like looking around because it's all really cool
it's crazy to me that everything's just stacked on stacked on stack there's so much of everything at
every shop it's not really like the north american like supply and demand like you only restock
when things are selling it's just like we're gonna have as much as possible
hope that it sells just crazy i don't know how they pack it all up every night that's why
so
wow look how beautiful this looks right now air doll this is so nice with the sun
oh everything's way more beautiful in the sun happy syrupy pigeons yeah
feeding pigeons here is such a big deal but it's they're crazy
and scary a pigeon hit me in the head literally flapped its wing on my head so now
i always thought that it would never hit me but they did and now i'm even more scared
i'm mostly scared they're gonna poop on me though thanks guys
so we came to this plaza earlier hoping to get a glass of wine after a full day of filming but
apparently we're a little too early so we went and got our favorite ice cream
instead and we're just gonna enjoy it in the nice sun in this gorgeous plaza
you can start
well we hope you enjoyed this brief tour of cuenca obviously it has a lot more to offer
than just what we've shown you today but these are kind of some of the highlights for us it is
a very beautiful city and probably from what we've shown you you can understand
why everyone is obsessed with cuenca it's really true like everyone loves cuenca we've been hearing
about cuenca all over ecuador uh from ecuadorians and from expats alike uh but we wanted to talk
about expats as well and and the reason why expats really love cuenca is because it really
has everything that you would want or things that you would at least be used to back home
absolutely sorry eating my ice cream but yeah it has every store we've seen a lot of like even
brands that we've seen at home as far as clothing even like vitamins and like medical services all
that stuff is here and just kind of yeah anything that an expat might be used to in north america
it kind of seems to have it here in cuenca so we understand why people like that so much
and another thing is that there are lots of different restaurants here as well
just kind of diverse we've been chinese food here we've seen indian food here
it's really nice because even though when you're in ecuador you should be eating ecuadorian food
as much as you can it's really nice to have something kind of conference of home uh just
eat while you're away yeah absolutely and there's just so many range in in types of restaurants too
you can get street food you can get kind of an almuerzo like we had today more traditional food
or you can go for super fancy expensive dinners if that's what you want for special occasions that's
right so uh we're curious actually if there's any expats that are watching if you could just
comment below and just let us know what is kind of your favorite thing about cuenca and maybe even
why you moved to cuenca yeah absolutely and one thing we realized in cuenca that we've never seen
elsewhere in ecuador so far is you can actually drink the tap water here it's pre-filtered and
it's supposed to be some of the best water in all of south america so that's pretty awesome too
definitely yeah so with that i think we're just going to conclude this video and if you want to
see more videos of ecuador and more of our faces like we said please subscribe uh and if you like
this video please like it it really helps us uh just kind of boost it and get shown to more people
yeah absolutely and if you live in a cuenca and you feel like this is a good representation send
it to all your friends back home so they can see cuenca is like and we'll see you in the next one