Exploring Cartagena: Jewel of the Spanish Main – by Vicki

Cartagena is a wonderful city - rich in history, infinitely explorable, a feast of colour and stone. The Old City, a world heritage site, is ringed by stone walls and bastions encasing lanes strung with pastel coloured houses – houses the colour of tumeric, jacaranda, cornflour blue, ochre, shell pink, verdant green, acqua ... and white. Churches are solid, tall and imposing outside but plain inside. Above the street are balconies and bougainvillea. At street level are shop fronts, boutique hotels, cafes and restaurants. On the street are food and drink sellers, teeshirt and hat sellers, and boat loads of tourists. But... watch out for the holes in the footpaths.

 

Cartagena seems a safe place to explore when the favelas (slums) are far away on the urban fringe. On the street we see Policia at regular intervals day and night. The wealthy are very wealthy and the poor work hard to make ends meet – there is not much in between. Donkeys pulling carts and people with barrows selling fruit and vegetables ply the streets. After dark people search the day’s garbage, little of this penetrates the tourist experience of the Old City.

 

At the heart of the Old City is tourist oriented gloss. At the periphery Cartogenians experience a different city in over-loaded buses, small yellow taxi’s, and kamikaze motorbike taxis. We enjoy walking through these spaces – tasting food, exploring lanes, and resting in church squares.

 

We walk along the stone walls seeking to understand how the five rings of defense worked. Land reclamation has filled the mangrove creeks and pushed the foreshore seaward. The series of islands originally settled by the Spanish can only be discerned after some research. The layout of the bastions and fortifications bears no relationship to the present landscape but mostly remains intact.

 

Stories of conquest abound. First the Spanish conquered the local indian tribes and sent their plunder back to the King of Spain. Next came the pirates and privateers, with some gaining incredible wealth and fame. Then the French and Britain Navy fought the Spanish. All the while malaria and yellow fever, bought to the continent by African slaves, was almost overwhelming everyone.

 

Statues celebrate key moments in the development of Cartagena – settlement to independence. Alongside this statues of modern art add to the diversity of this amazing city. Museums covering the Inquisition, gold artifacts from indian tribes, naval history, and the history of Cartagena inform and tell the story of Neuvo Granada.



Most days we go forth to explore. Early morning and late afternoon are the best time, when the sun in less intense and the humidity bearable. Some days we follow a theme, other days we explore a small area of the Old City.

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