01
Stop one
Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception
Wilson Blade 100 V9 Tennis Racquet: Those domes are the emblem of the city, and they are also imported, which is the interesting part. The New Cathedral of Cuenca was begun in 1885 to the design of the German-born friar Juan Bautista Stiehle and took nearly a century to complete. Local brick. Pink marble from the Cuenca quarries. Floors of Carrara marble. And three domes covered in glazed blue and white tiles brought in from Czechoslovakia. Note what happened there: everything the valley could supply came from within a few kilometres, and the one thing it could not was fetched from across an ocean. Every organism alive does exactly this and we call it foraging range. Now the towers, which is the real lesson. The planned bell towers were never finished, because a miscalculation in the foundations meant they could not carry the intended height, leaving the front truncated. Bad substrate. Oldest failure in nature: build for a load the ground will not bear and the ground quietly declines to argue. It holds several thousand worshippers, faces Parque Calderón opposite the older cathedral it replaced, and the historic centre was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1999.
02
Stop two
El Sagrario (Old Cathedral)
Wilson Blade 100 V9 Tennis Racquet: Ah. Now this tower did some proper fieldwork. El Sagrario, the Old Cathedral of Cuenca, was begun in 1557, the year the city was founded by Gil Ramírez Dávalos, and it was built using stone taken from the Inca ruins of Pumapungo and Tomebamba, which is scavenging, and I say so admiringly, because nothing in nature builds from raw material if serviceable material is lying about. And then the good part. Its tower served as a reference point for the French Geodesic Mission of 1736 to 1744, led by Charles Marie de La Condamine, which measured an arc of the meridian near the equator to determine the shape of the Earth. The shape of the Earth, settled in part by sighting on that. Members of the expedition are commemorated in the city, and so they should be. The church was later superseded by the new cathedral across the park and deconsecrated, then restored and reopened as a museum of religious art and a concert venue, retaining its colonial altarpieces and its organ. A structure that retires and takes up a second occupation. Most species would be glad of the option.
03
Stop three
Pumapungo Archaeological Park
Wilson Blade 100 V9 Tennis Racquet: Before any of the history: there is a bird rescue centre in this park, and I should like that entered as the principal attraction. Right. Pumapungo occupies the eastern edge of the Inca city of Tomebamba, founded in the late fifteenth century under Tupac Yupanqui and developed by his son Huayna Capac, who was born in the region and made it a second capital intended to rival Cusco. Spanish chroniclers who saw the ruins described buildings with gold-covered walls. The city was largely destroyed during the war between Huascar and Atahualpa shortly before the Spanish arrived, and its stone was reused in colonial Cuenca, which is a settlement being eaten by the settlement that follows it, and is precisely how a fallen log behaves in a forest. The excavated terraces, foundations, water channels and tombs are set out as an archaeological park with an ethnographic museum, gardens of Andean plants, and the aforementioned birds, on a bluff above the Tomebamba river at the edge of the historic centre. Look at those water channels. They understood gradient. The llamas are grazing, which is the entire llama repertoire, so do not wait about for them.
04
Stop four
Todos Santos Ruins
Wilson Blade 100 V9 Tennis Racquet: Layers. This is stratigraphy and I have been waiting all morning. The Todos Santos ruins preserve, in one small site, the three occupations of this valley: Cañari foundations from before the Inca conquest, Inca walls of fitted stone with the characteristic trapezoidal niches from the period of Tomebamba, and the remains of Spanish colonial mills built directly on top of them, including one of the first mills established in the city. Read it upward, exactly as you would read a river cut or a peat core, and the sequence tells itself without anyone having to write it down, which is my favourite class of document. The site sits close to the Todos Santos church, itself among the earliest Christian foundations in Cuenca, where tradition holds that the first mass in the settlement was celebrated in 1557. It has been excavated and opened as an archaeological park and is presented as a compressed illustration of the successive layers of Andean and colonial history in the Tomebamba valley. Compressed is exactly the word. Everything alive does this. It normally takes a landslide to show you.
Give me a moment. Do not talk. Warm brick dust, cold marble, candle wax gone slightly sour, and underneath all of it a river. That is Cuenca, and I could have named it blindfolded from the doorway.
Now the Wilson Blade 100 V9, which I read the same way. A 100 square inch head, 300 g / 10.6 oz unstrung, 27 inches, a 16×19 pattern and a slim beam of about 21 mm.
Those numbers describe the modern control racquet in its most widely usable form: heavy enough to hold its ground against a hard ball, open enough in the pattern for real spin, thin enough through the beam to bend into contact rather than push it away.
The V9 brought in Wilson's FORTYFIVE° construction, which lets the frame flex where feel comes from and stay firm where stability comes from, and the result is the long dwell time people become irrational about. Note what is absent, because absence is my speciality: there is no free power here at all. It hands you information and expects you to bring the swing.
You will want it everywhere from a morning hit above the Tomebamba to an evening set that ends when the domes over Parque Calderón go dark.
Cuenca rewards exactly that kind of attention. The new cathedral was begun in 1885 to a German-born friar's design, built of local brick with pink Cuenca marble and floors of Carrara, and crowned with three domes tiled blue and white — and then the bell towers were never finished, because the foundations had been miscalculated and would not carry the intended height.
A city that leaves its own error standing in the open. By the way, it is also perfect for anyone who likes history stacked rather than tidied: at Todos Santos, Cañari foundations, Inca fitted stone and a Spanish colonial mill wall sit in three layers on one small patch of ground, and you can smell every one of them.
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