Cuenca

The Panama hat's name is one of the more persistent geographic misnomers in the world — the hats have been hand-woven from toquilla palm straw in and around Cuenca since colonial times, with no meaningful connection to Panama in their production. The misleading name took hold when 19th-century exporters shipped the hats through Panama during the California Gold Rush, and it stuck permanently after Theodore Roosevelt was photographed wearing one during a 1906 visit to the Panama Canal construction site, cementing an association Ecuador has spent over a century trying to correct.

Cuenca's historic center, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1999, preserves one of Ecuador's most complete colonial-era cityscapes, its streets built along and across four rivers that still run through the city today, giving it a genuinely distinct layout compared to more purely grid-based Spanish colonial towns.

That preserved character, combined with a mild highland climate residents describe as eternal spring, a comparatively low cost of living, and reasonably accessible healthcare, has made Cuenca one of the most consistently recommended international retirement destinations for years, drawing a significant, established community of American and Canadian expatriates.

A few hours outside the city, the Ingapirca ruins hold Ecuador's largest known Inca archaeological site, blending Inca stonework with structures built earlier by the indigenous Cañari people — considerably smaller in scale than Peru's major Inca sites, but offering a genuine, uncrowded look at pre-Columbian construction and astronomical alignment.

Cajas National Park, in the páramo highlands just outside Cuenca, adds a strikingly different landscape within easy reach of the city — hundreds of glacial lakes scattered across a windswept, high-altitude ecosystem found in only a few places in the world, offering hiking largely untouched by the tourism infrastructure built up around Ecuador's more famous natural sites.