Search “bad things about living in Ecuador” and the first pages you get are lists of good things about living in Ecuador. That is not an accident and it is not even dishonest exactly — the pages ranking on that query belong to visa agencies and relocation publishers, and neither can afford to write a drawback that costs them a client. So here is the list, for Cuenca, Ecuador specifically, in the order of how often each one is the reason somebody actually leaves.
None of these is a reason not to come. I am still here after six years. They are the things I would want stated plainly before signing a twelve-month lease, and most of them are cheap to plan around if you know about them in advance.
Checked on 13 October 2026.
1. You will be cold indoors, and there is nothing to fix it with
The housing stock is built without heating. Not without good heating — without heating. The outdoor average does not obviously demand it, so it is not installed, and you cannot buy your way out of it beyond a portable heater and a thicker blanket.
This is the drawback that grows rather than fades. In year one it is a novelty; in year two it is the thing people complain about. It is also the one that is most addressable at the point of choosing a flat, which is why the climate is a lease-selection question, not a weather question.
2. It is loud, in ways that are not negotiable
Fireworks, at hours that will astonish you, for occasions you will not have heard of. Dogs, in numbers, at night, answering each other across a block. Buses on the arterial roads. Vendors with loudspeakers mounted on vehicles. Construction, which in a city growing this fast is somewhere near you most of the time.
None of it is aimed at you and none of it is going to stop. What you can do is treat noise as a primary criterion when choosing where to live, which almost nobody does on a first lease because they are choosing on photographs and rent. Stand on the balcony for ten minutes at nine at night before you sign.
3. Most people’s Spanish stops at the plateau
You will reach a functional level — shops, taxis, the counter — in your first year, and a large majority of people stop there, because functional is enough to live and the next level costs real effort for no immediate reward.
The cost is invisible and compounding: the version of this city available in English is much smaller than the city, and you only find out what you were missing if you get past it. This is the drawback most likely to be mistaken for something else — people describe it as “the community got stale” when what happened is that they stayed in the only room they could enter. The post on where the English-speaking city actually meets is about exactly that threshold.
4. Every administrative rule is learned by failing it once
The paperwork here is finite and the offices are not unreasonable. The problem is that the specific requirement that gets you turned away — the format, the copy you did not bring, the file size the portal rejects, the order the documents have to be in — is not published in a way you can find before you go.
So you make the trip twice. Everybody makes the trip twice. The whole reason this site exists is to reduce that number, and it cannot reduce it to zero, because the requirement that defeats you will be the one nobody has written up yet.
5. Distance, counted in connections and days
There is no short flight home. There is a flight to a hub and then a flight, and for most of the United States that is a full travelling day in each direction, at a fare that is not cheap and is worst exactly when you need it most — which is to say, booked at short notice for a family emergency.
Then there is the part people genuinely do not see coming: those trips consume an allowance. Time out of the country counts against your residency, and the absence rule is counted in days you have already spent. A year with two family emergencies in it is a year with a residency problem in it.
6. Imported anything carries a premium
The economy is dollarised, which removes exchange-rate risk and does not remove import cost. Locally grown food, local services, rent and labour are the things that make the monthly number attractive. Electronics, cars, appliances, branded goods, specialist ingredients and most things you would order online at home are not — the premium is real and in some categories it is large.
The practical version: your cost of living here is excellent if you live on what is produced here, and merely ordinary if you try to reproduce the shopping list you had at home. People who budget from an itemised month and then shop imported are surprised by their own bank statement.
Shipping a container solves part of it once and costs money and paperwork; replacing things later is the part that keeps costing.
7. Specialist medicine can mean travelling
Routine and most non-routine care here is accessible, competent and inexpensive relative to the United States, and the hospitals are covered in their own post. The drawback is depth rather than quality: for genuinely rare conditions or unusual specialisms, the answer may be Quito or Guayaquil, and occasionally it is a flight home.
If you have a condition that requires a specific specialist you already see, that is a question to research by name before you come, not after. This is an access-and-logistics point only; what your condition requires is a conversation with your own doctor.
8. The pavements
Narrow, uneven, frequently obstructed, often with a drop at the kerb and water running along them in the wet months. In the older parts of the city they are a genuine consideration for anybody with reduced mobility, a stick, or a tendency to trip.
This is not a reason to rule out the city — it is a reason to weight walkability and street surface heavily when choosing a neighbourhood, and to take the scouting trip on foot rather than in taxis.
9. The pace of commerce is not the pace you are used to
Things close at lunchtime. Things close on Sundays. Appointments move. The tradesman comes on a different day. Deliveries arrive in a window measured in days rather than hours, and tracking is approximate.
This one is temperament. Some people find it the best thing about being here and some find it a daily friction that never stops being a friction, and you cannot reliably predict which you are from how you imagine you would feel about it.
What is deliberately not on this list
Security. It is the first thing people ask about and it does not belong in a list of grievances, because it is a question that deserves actual figures and an actual source rather than an impression. It gets its own post — what a state of emergency means in this city, dated — and that post gives the mechanism and the source rather than a verdict on whether anywhere is safe.
The altitude. It is on nobody’s list of drawbacks because for most people it stops being noticeable in a few weeks, and for the minority where it matters it is not a drawback but a medical question that precedes the whole decision. See the altitude post.
Anything about the country’s politics. Not covered here, by policy.
The honest summary
Of the nine above, two are cheap to plan around at lease-signing time (cold, noise), two are a matter of personal effort (Spanish, pace), two are money (imports, flights), one is administrative tax you pay once per procedure, and two are genuine constraints you should research against your own circumstances before you come (specialist care, pavements).
That is a manageable list. It is just not the list you were given.
Sources
- Dollarisation and its consequence for imported goods pricing, as recorded on this site on 23 September 2026.
- The residency absence allowance and how it is counted, as set out in the post linked above and dated there.
- Everything else above — the noise, the indoor cold, the Spanish plateau, the pavements, the pace of commerce, the twice-to-the-counter pattern — is reported from six years of living in this city. It is observation, not survey data, and no percentage or ranking figure is attached to any of it for that reason. Your nine may be a different nine.
No business, landlord, clinic or individual is named above, and no complaint here is about a specific one.