This is Rosa and Cloudy, along with an interpreter.

They're talking to me from a small town in the mountains of Ecuador.

It's called Vilca Bamba.

These days, they live in a retirement community, but they've lived in Vilca Bamba their entire lives.

They say Vilca Bamba has always been a quiet place.

When Cloudy was growing up, he says there were just a handful of houses.

No cars. They got around using donkeys to carry things here and there.

Rosa says it was pretty much the same for her.

She came from a family of farmers. They lived on what they grew.

Vilca Bamba was a place where they could grow their own food.

Enjoy the weather, ease into old age.

Then, in the 1950s, some outsiders started to notice that folks in Vilca Bamba,

they were really easing into old age.

As in, lots of people were living well into their hundreds in this quiet world town.

As international curiosity increased, things in Vilca Bamba became not so quiet.

I'm Johanna Mayer, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, a trip to Vilca Bamba, a small town in Ecuador, where people came in search of the fountain of youth.

Spoiler alert, they didn't find it, but they stayed anyway.

After this.

These are backward areas, according to our view of modern societies.

They are agrarian communities, where nearly everyone works long hours on the rugged hillsides to make a living from the meager soil.

This is from a scientific article by Dr. Alexander Leif, a Russian-American doctor studying longevity.

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