This is a beautiful city, (our guide lives here) and has a lot to offer. Some tend to thing of this Ecuador as a 3rd world country but let me assure you that when you are in the major cities like Cuenca it is hard to believe. We spent the last two days touring the city and the country side. The Panama Hat; it doesn’t come from Panama it comes from Ecuador. You probably ask why then is it called the Panama Hat? Well there are many stories but the most common one is that when the Panama Canal was being built the workers used these hats to protect themselves from the scorching sun during the day. People who visited the work site began to associate the hats with Panama but the truth is the hats are made in Ecuador. We visited a hat factory and Berniece is now a proud owner of a Panama Hat, made of course in Ecuador!

Along the way to visit a Historical site we stopped to see a women, 87 years old, who still weaves the Panama Hats for a living. It takes her two days for a hat that sells for about $30.00,(she gets a very small part of that), hard to make a living doing that but she stills enjoys doing it. So to explain the process; the hats are weaved by the locals ands then sent to the factory to be bleached and shaped. The process is longer than what I am explaining here but the real hard work is still done by people in the country-side who spend hours weaving these hats. The tighter the weave the more expensive the hat. The tighter the weave the longer it takes.