Presidente Cordova

Cuenca's historic center is a UNESCO World Heritage site, which is a polite way of saying you are not allowed to build much there. The colonial grid, the clay-tile roofs, the churches, the river along its southern edge: all of it is protected, and rightly so. So when a genuinely new building goes up inside the centro historico, it is rare enough to be worth paying attention to. Presidente Cordova is one of those.

The building sits on its namesake street, a couple of blocks from Parque Calderon and close enough to the Tomebamba that you can walk down to the river before your coffee cools. Nine units share a central courtyard that pulls daylight into the middle of the building. Two are ground-floor commercial locales. The rest are homes, and they are deliberately not all the same: some are compact lofts with a mezzanine bedroom above the living space, one is a generous two-bedroom, and the top-floor units open onto private terraces wide enough for a long dinner under the open sky, with the historic rooftops below.

A position, not just square meters

What you buy here is location in its oldest sense. The cafes, the museums, the Sunday markets, the river walk: they are already outside your door. You do not drive to Cuenca's best part. You live inside it. An elevator serves every floor, and the building is under construction now, which means there is still a choice of units and still time to make a unit your own.