“Why do you live in Ecuador?” A story of how it took a year to find my new home

I have lost count of how many times I’ve been asked this and honestly, it was never somewhere I had considered. You know what, I don’t think I’d ever even thought of the country except maybe with that banger by “Sash!”. So it certainly wasn’t for negative reasons… I didn’t have an opinion on it, it wasn’t even close to being on my radar.

I’d spent the last year slowly moving through Latin America, my mind was made up, I wanted to live somewhere here. I love it, beyond words. The culture, the music, the people, the food, the nature, the dancing. Life is for living here, everybody is outside, everybody is making the most of what they’ve got.

But there are of course downsides. Nowhere is perfect. Latin America is fucking noisy, super car-centric and pretty chaotic. My worst nightmare. With that, my aim was to try to find peaceful medium-sized cities with a good quality of life, access to nature and just, quiet. I certainly had my work cut out.

Discovering Mexico

So where did I start? Mexico City. LOL 😂. Probably LATAM’s loudest city. It’s actually an amazing city, but it’s gentrified to hell, it’s quicker to jog than take a taxi anywhere and damn it’s massive and noisy. One of its many nicknames, “The Monster” (El Monstruo), is for a good reason.

But I tell you what, I loved it so much and I properly fell in love with Mexico. All I’d ever seen of Mexico was what we see in American media… some desolate wasteland, that’s always strangely paired with a blurry yellow filter in American movies. Imagine my surprise when I started to experience the real Mexico and discovered “Vitamina T”. For the uniniciated, vitamina T is the nickname for Mexican food because all the good stuff starts with the letter T. It’s not some whacky drug, before the rumours start… 😂

I made my way east through Mexico, starting with the quaint city of Oaxaca. A beautiful city that I can’t recommend highly enough for a holiday, which I thought would make my shortlist but, after spending two months there I didn’t like the climate; very hot and very dry. No greenery and not really any options for long-distance running, my favourite hobby. I carried on east and then stumbled upon San Cristobal de las Casas, and this town came really close but I realised I’d be bored out of my mind long-term. Maybe it would be a nice retirement spot in the future, but for now, this was a no, too.

Continuing east I headed to Palenque to see the famous ruins (note: Palenque is lightyears more impressive than Chichen Itza) before arriving in the city of Merida in Yucutan – and that’s where it clicked. I’d found my city. There was just one itty-bitty problem with it: for six months of the year, the place is a mosquito-infected sauna, with temperatures approaching 40C and a boatload of rain. With that, I realised I’d need to find a second city; either as an alternative or somewhere I could spend the other half of the year when the temperature got too hot to handle.

Onwards to Central America

I was finished with Mexico now, I’d spent about 3 months there and I had my first city on my shortlist. I headed south on the typical “gringo trail” through Central America, a region I’d never explored, and I had lots of options. I started in Antigua Guatemala, it had everything I wanted; hiking trails, volcanoes and manageable weather but… it just wasn’t real life, it was too touristy. I couldn’t live in a tourist capital my entire life, this wasn’t somewhere I could put roots down. I was feeling a little pooped by this point, I had been on the road for about 5-6 months and had seen over 10 cities and 3 countries.

I decided to take a little break and I headed slightly west across Guatemala to Lake Atitlan for a month. This is a huge lake in the caldera of a dormant supervolcano – the lake itself is twice the size of my home island 🤯. Lake Atitlan is surrounded by a variety of different towns all with their own vibe; from Panajachel which I can only describe as the Magaluf of Central America, San Marcos which is a vomit-inducing yoga hippy village and my personal favourite San Juan which is a sleepy little town where I based myself for a month to brush up on Spanish and relax whilst planning my next steps.

After a month in Guatemala I boarded a series of minibuses (“colectivos”) and made my way across the border to El Salvador, touching down in Santa Ana, with further plans to go south through El Salvador, followed by a dodgy sea-crossing to Nicaragua (Brits need a visa for Honduras, if you want to do a land-crossing), down to Costa Rica, onwards to Panama and then sail on a week-long booze cruise to Colombia. Pretty cool, if I’m honest.

But the reality was, I very quickly realised that Central America was not somewhere I wanted to settle down long-term; it was still very behind in development, visa options weren’t great and the food was like if Temu made Mexican food. It’s a great region to travel and discover, but for long-term living? Not for me. I decided to stop trying to make the shoe fit and I boarded a flight from San Salvador (El Salvador’s capital) to the Colombian capital of Bogotá, I didn’t need to spend any more time searching in Central America.

I’ve long been against the idea of living in a big city, I don’t think I can handle the overwhelm, looking over my shoulder, the traffic. But I needed to try it out, so I went to Bogotá. I really enjoyed it actually, I’d say it’s like the London of LATAM. Always grey, always raining and the odds of being stabbed & having your phone stolen are high, very high. Jokes aside, it’s a great city but that was another struck off the list and I headed east via a 12-hour bus to a little-known city called Bucaramanga.

Finding city #2

Ladies & gentlemen, I’d done it. I’ve found city number 2. Bucaramanga is like a smaller Medellin without all the passport bros. Tree-lined streets, ample cafes and restaurants and just a short drive from the second largest canyon in the world and “Colombia’s most beautiful town”, Barichara.

And before I knew it, I was finished. Seven months into my exploratory trip and I’d found two cities I could happily live in; Colombia’s digital nomad visa (DNV) was simple enough and Mexico’s DNV didn’t seem too tricky either, although they allow multiple-entry six-month visits on a tourist visa. So that was it, I was sorted. I now needed to start planning

I tried a couple more spots in Colombia whilst I was there; Medellin (too busy and like a giant frat party), Manizales (intensely boring) and Pereira. The latter I actually really liked, but nothing was going to top Bucaramanga now, my mind was made up. It was time to get home, get the dog, apply for a visa and start my new life.

“But wait, didn’t you end up in Ecuador?”

I still had about two months left on my self-imposed deadline for sorting my life out, so I thought, right… let’s go on “holiday”. I have a ridiculously long bucket list but two standout priorities for me are: visit the Galapagos Islands and visit Antarctica. One was going to cost $10,000 and the other was going to cost about $3,000. So I started researching the Galapagos Islands (you can see my trip report here). What I didn’t realise was, that the Galapagos Islands were actually a part of Ecuador, which meant I’d have to clear customs on the mainland before jetting across to the islands. Ecuador was a country I’d never seen nor had any intention of visiting, I had planned to finish up in Peru (still one of my favourites) and was going to fly back to the UK from there once my trip was finished.

But, I thought, I might as well make the most of some time in Ecuador if I’m going to fly there, surely there will be a city I can find to spend a couple of weeks in: I had quite a bit of paperwork to prepare for my Estonian e-Residency to incorporate my company and I was working on a big project, I needed a bit of peace and quiet, plus good internet.

I had a chat with my bezzie, ChatGPT, told it all about the cities I’d been to at this point in heavy detail, what I liked and what I didn’t like. Would there be somewhere I’d like to spend a couple of weeks in Ecuador before hopping across to the islands? It came back and recommended me a city called Cuenca 👇

What have I done?

I hopped onto Google Flights and booked a flight to Cuenca from where I was, Pereira and, in classic Google Flights-fashion, I ended up in Guayaquil 🤷‍♂️ which was a three-hour drive away. Google Flights has a very annoying habit of recommending alternative nearby airports without highlighting this to you. That’s fine in Europe where you can get across a country in 45-minutes but Latin America isn’t famed for it’s roads and the 200km drive is 4 hours if you’re lucky. I finally arrived in Cuenca that night, on the west-end of Avenida Remigio Crespo, a bit of a shit-hole to put it lightly. I got my phone out to flag down an Uber… oh… there’s no Uber here.

What have I done?

This place is horrible, I thought.

I finally managed to flag down a taxi (I genuinely don’t think I’d ever done that before that moment – strange right?) and headed to my Airbnb near Parque San Sebastian. The night was dark, freezing cold and wet, I couldn’t believe I was about to stay here for two weeks.

Oh hold on a minute…

I woke up the next day, a bit deflated from a rough start in Cuenca and I headed down to the river for a walk and it clicked straight away.

I had got this so wrong, was this the most beautiful city I’d ever visited in South America?

As the days turned into weeks, I fell in love with the city. From somewhere I thought had been a disaster, just a matter of days later, it shot up to the top of my list. I started to research if I could live here, and I then discovered they had a digital nomad visa… it’s the most convoluted one of the lot (I have it, trust me), but it allows me to live here for two years and, if I want, I can extend for another two and then convert to permanent. You can see more of Cuenca through my postcards here, or my trip report here.

And, long story short, that was that, I scrapped all my original plans and decided to move to Cuenca – a city that’s often cited as South America’s most beautiful and safest city, with the highest quality of life too!

OK but… why Ecuador?

Yeah sorry, the actual point of this entire article. I love a good story. My requirements are pretty simple: nature, medium-size city, typical comforts of modern living, decent infrastructure, a body of water nearby and an active sports community. Cuenca has all of that.

The city is home to three rivers (and two more on the outskirts) that cut through the city with ample parks and paths alongside. The main river, Riobamba, is home to almost 30 kilometres of walking and cycle paths and the other major river, Yanuncay, where I live, is home to another 10km or more, too.

A mere 30-minute drive up the road is El Cajas National Park, like somebody took the Scottish Highlands and plonked it right here in Ecuador, this park is 4.5x larger than that of my home-island and is home to hundreds of kilometres of hikes, I go there most weekends with the guys from Outdoors Cuenca.

Then there’s the food… now, I’ll probably be deported for this, but I don’t rate Ecuadorian food that much. Don’t get me wrong, it’s OK, but I think the locals think they’re on par with Lima, which is a bit of a stretch. But, Cuenca does have a huge international dining scene, with lots of cafés, restaurants and bars – I’m always finding new places to go.

On the social side of things: it’s been a little trickier. The expat community here are all retirees in their 70s and 80s, so the likelihood of finding other nomads or travellers here is few and far between. As such, I’ve been trying to integrate locally which I think is better anyway and, as I get more comfortable with my Spanish I’m starting to make new friends. There are run clubs, hiking clubs, language clubs, chess clubs. You name it, there is something for everyone. I’ve joined a hiking club (Outdoors Cuenca, linked above) and thinking about joining a run club and a bicycle club too, when I convince myself to drop a few grand on a new road bike… but time will tell.

On top of this, Cuenca was recently rated the city with the highest quality of life in all of South America, too. So yeah, I’ve definitely made the right choice.

At the time of writing, I’ve now spent close to four months living in Cuenca. I’ve experienced all of the typical highs and lows of moving to the other side of the world alone, but it’s really starting to feel like home and I’m ever so slowly starting to make friends, the people here are so welcoming and I’ve definitely made the right decision. Viva Cuenca 🫶

Nomadas Bistro

Parque Calderon

Brewery

Iglesia Virgen De Bronce

Along the river in Cuenca

Rio Tomebamba

Inside Mansión Alcázar Boutique Hotel

Hummingbird graffiti

Casa Firenza

Avenida Simon Bolivar

El Cajas

Rio Yanuncay