Southern Highlands

After Quito, Cuenca is Ecuador’s most important and beautiful colonial city. But don’t say that to the locals, who insist that their laid-back culture, cleaner streets and more agreeable weather outclass the capital, hands down.

Dating from the 16th century, Cuenca’s historic center, a Unesco World Heritage Site with its trademark skyline of massive rotundas and soaring steeples, is a place time keeps forgetting: nuns march along cobblestone streets, kids in Catholic-school uniforms skip past historic churches, and old ladies spy on promenading lovers from their geranium-filled balconies.

The city is the center of many craft traditions, including ceramics, metalwork and the internationally famous panama hat – and the nearby villages offer many more handicrafts besides.

Only 30km west of Cuenca, Parque Nacional Cajas encompasses 2854 sq km of golden moor-like páramo (high-altitude grassland) dotted with hundreds of chilly lakes that shine like jewels against a bleak, rough countryside.

Ecuador’s best-preserved archaeological site, Ingapirca, with its semi-intact temple, grazing llamas and open fields, is definitely worth a stopover if you are headed this way. The ruins were originally used by the Cañari people as an observatory. The strategic site was later taken over and developed by the Inca during the 15th century as a military stronghold.

If you start early, you could easily visit the Sunday markets at all three of these traditional towns and be back in Cuenca for happy hour. Doing this, in fact, is deservedly one of Cuenca's most popular day trips. Between them all you’ll find many traditional handicrafts: woven baskets, fine gold and silver filigreed jewelry, woodwork, pottery, guitars and ikat textiles – made using a pre-Columbian technique of weaving tie-dyed threads.

Surrounded by emerald hills that have been sown with hearty tubers and grains for thousands of years, Saraguro, 165km south of Cuenca, is the center of indigenous Saraguro culture. This prosperous and proud indigenous group originally lived near Lake Titicaca in Peru but ended up here in the 1470s as a result of the Inca Empire’s system of mitimaes (resettlement).

Saraguro's excellent community-tourism projects are applauded across Ecuador – there are few better places in South America to go off grid and authentically experience indigenous highland culture.

Podocarpus National Park fills in much of the triangle between Loja, Zamora and Vilcabamba as well as a huge swath to the southeast. Because altitude ranges so greatly within the park borders (from around 900m in the lowland sector to over 3600m in the highland sector), Podocarpus has some of the world's greatest plant and animal diversity. Perhaps 40% of its estimated 3000 plant species occur nowhere else in the world, and close to 600 bird species have been recorded. Rare mammals include foxes, deer, pumas, mountain tapirs and bears.

Oh, Vilcabamba: where mountains soar alluringly above town, where the balmy air is synonymous with longevity (it shot to fame for its high number of centenarians after Reader’s Digest did stories on them in 1955), where those who encounter it simply get waylaid – sometimes for months, sometimes years…

The area’s beautiful scenery, mild weather and laid-back vibe attract waves of visitors: backpackers as well as North American and European retirees. Hiking, horseback riding and meditation are popular activities. The hills are dotted with big new houses, and the town plaza with expat-owned businesses. Gringo-ization has created tension about the cost of land and living, but the flip side is that jobs in tourism and construction are more plentiful than ever, and Vilcabamba is the rare Ecuadorian pueblo where young people have little ambition to leave for the big city.