Cajas National Park

The bus from Cuenca takes forty minutes on the Ruta 582, climbing out of the city so quickly that your ears pop before you’ve even finished your coffee. By the time the driver drops us at the park entrance, the temperature has fallen fifteen degrees and the light has changed completely — that flat, shadowless white that only exists above 4,000 metres, where the sun is close but somehow diffuse, the whole sky turned into a single soft lamp.

Into the Páramo

The páramo is not dramatic in the way mountains usually are. There are no cliffs, no dramatic drops. It is a landscape of accumulation — thousands of tussock grass clumps, waterlogged soil that sinks underfoot, and 235 lakes scattered between the ridges like pieces of dropped mirror. The Laguna Toreadora is the largest and the first one we reached, its surface the colour of old pewter, completely still. A pair of Andean ducks cut across the far end without making a sound.

What I hadn’t expected was the smell. Not pine, not the green smell of lower-altitude forest — something sharper, mineral, with a sweetness underneath it from the frailejón plants that grow in dense rosettes along the banks. Lia crouched down to smell one and looked up surprised, as if she’d expected nothing and received something.

The Polylepis Groves

The polylepis trees stopped me. I’d read about them but I wasn’t ready for what they actually looked like: ancient, papery-barked, their trunks bent into improbable angles, some of them no taller than I am despite being decades old. The altitude compresses everything. The trees grow as if they are leaning into a permanent wind, even on still days, the memory of pressure written into the wood. In the grove near Laguna Luspa, the light came through the canopy in thin shafts, and the ground beneath was covered in thick moss, improbably green, improbably soft for a place this high.

A park ranger we passed told us that Cajas holds more freshwater per square kilometre than almost anywhere in the Andes. All of it visible, none of it wasted on distance — lake after lake, separated only by ridges you can cross in ten minutes on foot.

What Surprised Me

The silence surprised me. Not the absence of sound, exactly — the wind moves constantly — but the absence of human noise. An hour into the walk along the Camino del Inca trail, the road had vanished, the bus had vanished, and there was only the grass bending in long slow waves and the cold sitting on my shoulders like something patient.

When to go: The dry season runs from June to September and offers the clearest skies and best visibility across the lakes. The rest of the year brings frequent mist and rain, which makes the landscape more atmospheric but the trails harder — go early regardless, as cloud typically rolls in by early afternoon.