Every “solo travel” list for a city eventually pads itself out with something you shouldn’t actually do alone, and Cuenca’s version of that trap is Cajas National Park. Everything else here genuinely works solo; that one doesn’t, and it’s worth saying plainly rather than burying it in a bullet list. What works: cathedral, coffee, and your own schedule Parque Calderón, in front of the New Cathedral’s blue-and-white domes, is the easiest solo morning in the city: coffee, nobody paying attention to a table set for one, and good early light for photographing the domes before midday flattens the color.

Ask a Cuencano what to plan a visit around and most won’t mention a museum or a viewpoint first, they’ll ask what date you’re arriving, because the city’s real calendar is built around four events, not its landmarks. Land on the wrong week and you miss all of them; land on the right one and the city itself becomes the show. Worth flying in for: Pase del Niño Viajero, December 24 Around 500,000 people, more than Cuenca’s own population, pack Calle Bolívar every Christmas Eve for a procession centered on a carved Christ-child figure dating to 1823, later blessed by the Pope during a 1961 pilgrimage.

Two or three days sees Cuenca’s historic center, its cathedral tower, and one good market lunch. After that, the city itself runs thin, and the honest move is to use it as a base rather than pad the itinerary with a second museum you don’t actually want to see. Three routes stretch out from here, and only one of them is a genuine loop back to the same bed each night.