How to use Eloquent without losing performance (51.39%) in Lumen 5.4?

Question

Developing an API that should handle a high performance website. Doing some tests I verified that the use of Eloquent is downloading the performance of the requests in the database Mysql in 51.39% (more than half). OS is Ubuntu 16.04 and the framework is Lumen 5.4. The query selects all cities from the Cities table (5565 city).

//Rota
$app->get('cities', 'CitiesController@index');

This is controller Cities Citiescontroller:

namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;
use App\Models\Citie;

class CitiesController extends Controller
{
    /**
     * Create a new controller instance.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function __construct()
    {
        //
    }

    public function index()
    {
        return DB::select("SELECT * FROM cities");
        //return Citie::all();
    }
}

This is Model Citie:

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Citie extends Model
{
    protected $guarded=['id'];
}

I’m using POSTMAN to make the 10 requests for each approach (With and without Eloquent).

Com Eloquente - >  return Citie::all();
Sem Eloquente - >  return DB::select("SELECT * FROM cities");

And these are the results in milliseconds(ms):

Eloquently:

1975
1698
1809
1817
1918
1841
1897
1689
1854
1958
média - 1845.6

Eloquently:

3449
3684
3654
3667
3546
3491
3462
3531
3614
3815
média - 3591.3

The result is that in this test the use of Eloquent is decreasing the performance of the request by 51.39 % compared to the scenario without Eloquent.

Here is an example of output:

And the sql of Cities table creation:

-- -----------------------------------------------------
-- Table `cities`
-- -----------------------------------------------------
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `cities` (
  `fk_province` INT NOT NULL,
  `id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `name` VARCHAR(45) NOT NULL,
  `geocodeBr` VARCHAR(50) NULL DEFAULT 'null',
  `lat` DECIMAL(10,8) NULL DEFAULT NULL,
  `long` DECIMAL(11,8) NULL DEFAULT NULL,
  `created_at` TIMESTAMP NULL,
  `updated_at` TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  INDEX `fk_city_province_idx` (`fk_province` ASC),
  CONSTRAINT `fk_city_province`
    FOREIGN KEY (`fk_province`)
    REFERENCES `provinces` (`id`)
    ON DELETE NO ACTION
    ON UPDATE NO ACTION)
ENGINE = InnoDB
DEFAULT CHARACTER SET = utf8;

So the question is how to use the Eloquent so that it reaches the average test results without using Eloquent, in case - 1845.6 ms, ie without losing this performance of just over 50%?

Some configuration that is missing?

Note: This is a fresh installation of Lumen 5.4. I only drew comments from Facade and Eloquent on bootstrap/app.php as suggested by official documentation.