Saturday 13 August 2011
Cuenca. Very different from Quito, very European. In fact it reminded me straight away of Granada.
Cuenca is Ecuador’s most important and most beautiful city after Quito. Although the locals think they’re number one! Just like in Quito, the historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and standing there you feel as if time has stood still. The city is perhaps most famous as the home of the panama hat, although it is also a centre for many craft traditions including ceramics, metalwork and intricate and vibrant weavings called “ikat”. Cuenca was almost the northern most city, known then as Tomebamba, in the Incan empire. When the Spanish arrived they incorporated the ruins of the city in their own structures.
We arrived in Cuenca just after 7am and immediately bought our return tickets. I wanted to travel back during the day and bought a ticket for a bus leaving at 8.30am on Monday morning. I’m too old to be able to travel back overnight and then spend the day working with children! My friend wanted to visit the nearby national park on Monday and decided to travel back overnight. After purchasing our tickets, we took a taxi to our hostal and were able to have a quick wash before heading out in search of breakfast, which proved much harder than we thought as both the places we had bookmarked in our guides no longer exist. After a bit of searching we found a lovely café/ice-cream parlour/bakery and ordered a desayuno criollo because it included cake!! I’m very much in favour of any culture that thinks cake is part of breakfast. Our desayuno criollo consisted of fresh fruit juice (We thihnk it was mandarin), hot chocolate, scrambled eggs with corn, a slice of cake of our choice (we both went for chocolate), and a roll with butter and jam. It was fantastic and set us up for our day. The café was in the city’s largest plaza, Parque Calderón, right next to the new cathedra, La Inmaculada Concepción (Immaculate Conception). The new cathedral was built from 1885 to 1967. It has beautiful giant domes of sky-blue Czech tiles that are visible from all over Cuenca. They are vaguely reminiscent of Gaudí’s designs. The inside of the cathedral is very simple when compared to other Latin American churches. I was expecting something much tackier and kitschier.
The plaza is beautifully landscaped with palm trees and other lovely trees and flowers. On the opposite side of the plaza is the old cathedral, known as El Sagrario. It was built from 1557 to 1739. Like every good Latin American city, Cuenca seems to have a church on every corner. All the usual Saints are represented, San Blas, San Sebastián and others. Our next stop was the panama hat museum to see how they are made. But do you know what it should be called? In Ecuador it is called a sombrero de paja toquilla (toquilla-straw hat). True connoisseurs call it a Montecristi, named after the most famous hat-making town of all. And why is it called a panama hat I hear you ask. Well, this misnomer dates back to the 1800s, when Spanish entrepreneurs, quick to recognise the unrivalled quality of the paja toquilla, began exporting them to Panama. During the 19th century, workers on the Panama Canal used these light and extremely durable hats to protect themselves from the tropical sun. This helped solidify the association with Panama. Paja toquilla hats are made from the fibrous fronds of the toquilla plam (Carludovica palmate). This trees grows in the arid inland regions of the central Ecuadorian coast, particularly around Montecristi and Jipijapa. No other country has managed to grow palms with the same quality of fronds, although several countries in South America and Asia have tried.
The work that goes into these hats is incredible. First, the palms are harvested for their shoots, which are ready just before they open into leaves. Bundles of shoots are harvested and transported by donkey and truck to coastal villages where the fibres are prepared. The preparation process beings with beating the shoots on the ground and then splitting them by hand to remove the long, thin, flat, cream-coloured leaves. The leaves are tied into bundles and boiled in huge vats of water for about 20 minutes before being hung up to dry for three days. Some are soaked in sulphur to bleach them. As the split leaves dry, they shrink and roll up into the round strands that are used for weaving. Some of the finished straw stays on the coast, but most is purchased by buyers from Cuenca and surrounding areas, where the hats are woven buy hand. Indeed, you’ll see more panama hats in an around Cuenca than you will anywhere else in Ecuador. The weaving process itself is arduous and the best weavers work only in the early evening and morning, before the heat causes their fingers to sweat. Some work only by moonlight. Weaves vary from a loose crochet (characteristic of the hats you see sold everywhere) to a tighter “Brisa” weave, which is used for most quality panama hats.
Hats are then graded by the density of their weaves, which generally fall into four categories: standard, superior, fino (fine) and superfine (superfine). Most hats you see are standard or superior. If you hold a real superfine up toi the light, you shouldn’t see a single hole. The best of them will hold water and some are so finely woven and so pliable that they can, supposedly, be rolled up and pulled through a man’s ring! After the hats are woven, they still need to be trimmed, bleached if they’re to be white, blocked and banded. Then they’re ready to sell. Although standard-grade hats start at around $15 in Ecuador, a superfine can cost anywhere between $100 and $500. This may seem expensive, but the same hat will easily fetch three times that amount on shelves in the USA and Europe. Considering the work that goes into a superfine, they rightly should! Maybe I should start a panama hat import business…
At lunchtime we went back to our hostal and checked in. We stayed at Hostal Macando which I can highly recommend. It is set around an inner courtyard and has a lovely garden at the back. It was friendly, quiet and clean. I had a huge room with a private bathroom, the water was piping hot, something that’s hard to find in Ecuador! In the afternoon, we went our separate ways and I spent time wandering around taking photographs. I also visited a craft market and bought some earrings. We met up later for dinner at a lovely Italian restaurant and had a very enjoyable evening chatting and putting the world to rights before having an early-ish night.
Lx
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