El Chorro waterfalls and Busa lake

Girón is 460 mts lower than Cuenca. Thus, it’s a bit sunnier, warmer, and drier; though it’s only 35 km approx from Cuenca, it receives 30% less precipitation. It’s bordered on the northeast by Portete Hill, to the south by the fertile Yunguilla Valley, and on the east by El Chorro Mountain. The headwaters of El Chorro River (5 km approx from Girón), form three waterfalls, including a magnificent double waterfall, that can be seen from town; the river flows through Girón, then joins the Rircay River, which joins the Jubones River.

Girón has a friendly and clean indoor mercado, with plenty of local products, including subtropical produce. Girón’s church is distinctly modern, completed in 1968, with striking stained-glass windows in the basilica. There’s not much colonial architecture around town, but the Casa de los Tratados (House of Treaties) Museo Histórico Militar is Girón’s focal point.

A little more than 5 km from town is the famous 60 mts high Chorro de Girón, the first of three waterfalls lined with moss and bromeliads. A two-hour hike through lush vegetation under a cloud-forest canopy leads to its base.

BUSA LAGOON

The Leoquina lagoon or lagoon of Busa is one of the main attractions of the canton San Fernando. It is located 55 kilometers south west of the city of Cuenca and extends along 12 hectares of land, is one of those places that deserve to be visited by the exuberant beauty of its water mirror and the imposing presence of the San Pablo hill behind it, the deep dimension of the forest that surrounds it, the enormous stones Scattered around it, and, finally, that landscape that seems to have been taken from the cover of a puzzle, from the texture of a loom or from a lost dream of some Dada writer: unlikely.

For the Aborigines it was a sacred lagoon, a space of convergence of the various realities that complement this plan for the Andean Cañari worldview; Some historians even locate it, next to the Mount San Pablo that the blanket, like the place where the legend of this millenary and intriguing culture is born, the canary and it is linked with the deluge that desolated the earth and of which only two were saved Brothers, and once the water fell, they joined the mythological women-huacamayas who would have brought their food, and from this union, the Cañari strain began.