Convoking the muses of Cuenca.

• Author: Romano-Benner, Norma
• Position: Assessment of Cuenca, Ecuador's tourist-attracting potential - Includes related article

ECUADORIANS HAVE LONG considered it their country's loveliest tourist destination, but to foreign visitors the charms of colonial Cuenca, Ecuador's third largest city, have gone largely unnoticed. With no paved roads to connect it to the rest of the country until the 1960s, this small but sophisticated enclave in the southern Andean highlands has remained off the tourist's beaten path. Cuenca is all too easily sidestepped in favor of the more accessible splendors of cosmopolitan Quito, Ecuador's two-mile-high capital city and the tropical allure of its sprawling port, Guayaquil, on the Pacific cost.

Now all that may change if the city's leaders have their way. As part of a country-wide promotional campaign, a group of American development specialists were invited to explore Cuenca and its environs in order to assess the area's tourist-attracting potential. After sampling its mild climate, its superb treasury of colonial architecture and decorative arts, its pre-Colombian ruins, its lakestudded national parks and Indian markets with their array of fine handicrafts, theteam promptly declared Cuenca one of Ecuador's--if not South America's--best kept secrets.

For all its centuries-old legacy of isolation, Cuenca is not now nor ever has been as sleeply backwater town. As the capital of Azuay province and a respected center of learning since the colonial era, its three universities have supplied this small south American republic with a continuing sream of prominent diplomats, poets, jurists and writers. The city is the birthplace of such illustrious figures as Luis Cordero, a nineteenth century writer who became president of the republic; Cesar Davila Andrade, a poet of international fame during the 1940s; and the contemporary novelist/journalist Eliecer Cardenas. For years (until the 1940s) Cuenca was the site of the only regularly held meeting of poets in Latin America, the annual Fiesta de la Lira, where people lieterally became drunk with poetry and rhyme and reason competed for survival. Thsi event has evolved into today's Encuentro de Escritores, a triennial meeting of writers from throughout Ecuador, sponsored by the University of Cuenca. Small wonder, then, that Cuenca is referred to as the Athens of the Andes.

The city has also nourished a variety of noted painters and scupltors and boasts an intense cultural and artistic life with dozens of theaters, concert halls and museums, such as the impressive Museo de Arte Moderno. This museum is the venue for the Bienal Internacional de Pinturas-Cuenca, a biennial exhibition brining together prominent visual artists from throughout the Hemisphere. The...