Cartagena

Cartagena de Indias is one of the most beautiful cities in the Americas — a perfectly preserved colonial walled city on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, where 500 years of history are contained within fortress walls and expressed through streets of impossible color. Gabriel García Márquez set his greatest novels here, and walking through the old city, you understand why.

The walled city, Cartagena's UNESCO World Heritage heart, is a labyrinth of ochre and indigo buildings draped in bougainvillea, with wooden balconies overhanging streets too narrow for cars and plazas where the evening air smells of fried food and colonial memory. Beyond the walls, the neighborhoods of Getsemaní have transformed into a street art mecca and the creative heart of modern Cartagena.

Cartagena is also a gateway to the Islas del Rosario — a coral archipelago of extraordinary clarity 45 minutes offshore — and to the Afro-Colombian communities of the Palenque, where the descendants of the first free Africans in the Americas maintain a culture and language found nowhere else on earth.