Colombia 2: Cartagena
Castles and Mud Volcanos, exploring Cartagena’s colonial legacy
In 1509 14-year-old Kaitegua watched nervously as four massive canoes with square sails above them sailed in to the bay near her village. The village of Kalamari was located on a small island beside a large bay on the northern coast of South America. They had already heard of the raids these Spanish had made on other villages on the coast, but there was little they could do as three hundred colonists under one Alonso de Ojeda (and with Francisco Pizarro, later conquistador of Peru. Hernan Cortez was supposed to come too but didn’t feel well and missed this trip) rowed ashore in their smaller boats. I don’t know if the natives waited for the Spanish to declare themselves the native’s overlords or fought from the first moment but the result was the destruction of the local villages. The over-confident Spanish then ventured further inland and after a native counter-attack only a handful of men from Ojeda’s expedition escaped to the ships, including de Ojeda, Pizarro, and the 14-year-old native girl they kidnapped and named Catalina.
Thirteen years later another Spaniard returned, finding the villages there still in ruins, founded Cartagena. He had with him as interpreter & concubine 27-year-old Catalina de India.
Four hundred and ninety years later, I disembarked a Latam Airlines A320 airliner at the Cartagena airport with my lovely Venezuelan fiancée Cristina. After the cold of Bogota, the air of Cartagena was hot and humid, and full of rain as we deplaned on the tarmac and walked through open air to the small arrivals terminal.
We thereupon took note of a sign saying the taxi fare should be 14,900 Colombian pesos to the zone our hotel was in, hopped in a taxi, and were charged 30,000 pesos (“because it’s raining”). Welcome to Cartagena (no other taxi drivers there tried to scam us). Then, even though it was only 11:30 am we were told we couldn’t check in to our hotel until 3:00 pm, and we were exhausted from a late night and early morning and I was possibly getting sick. In fact, Dr Cristina (she is, in fact, a doctor) soon declared I had the flu. So we just laid low in the room the rest of the afternoon.
Day 1: Mud Volcano
Since I was still feeling unwell, I thought the mud volcano I’d heard about sounded like a relaxing thing to do. In the morning we asked the tour booking woman in the lobby about it and she said a tour bus heading there would come by in just five minutes and we could get on it. We quickly got our things together and paid (300,000 pesos ($75) for the two of us) and we were off!
The bus was mostly full, other than one man who appeared to be from the United States everyone else was from Latin America or the Caribbean. We traveled about 45 minutes along a main highway until we turned off and shortly came to the unmistakable shape of a small volcano by some kiosks and a lake.
In fact, the volcano looked a bit too much like a volcano. As far as I can tell the entire “volcano” structure appears to be man-made. At the top of it is a square wooden-sided mud pool. Wikipedia calls it an “active volcano,” but in the case of Wikipedia entries on obscure tourist destinations, I have found they often are just based on something a local guide had said which may not have a solid backing. I couldn’t find any source that seemed more authoritative than local claims but personally, it did not look to me like an actual mud volcano.
That being said, the mud did feel nice. Someone watched our towels (for 5,000 pesos / person), and another held our phones (another 5,000) and took pictures of us as one by one we descended into the mud pool, where men massaged you for 5,000 (one could decline this as Cristina did). After 10–15 minutes we climbed out and went down to the lake to wash off. Women were down there to help you wash off (5,000). I initially declined because I’m a grown-ass adult I can wash myself — but they were insistent so I relented and let them pour water on me.
Just before we all re-boarded the bus the local attendants all crowded around to get their pay for their individual tasks. You had to pay the specific people you owed money to individually. This seemed really unnecessarily complicated and tedious and there were some contentions about who owed money to whom, and after what was otherwise a pleasant experience a few people left grumbling. They really ought to better organize their process.
From there the bus took us to a nearby beach where we had lunch at a small but nice hotel and then had a few hours to relax there. Because I still wasn’t feeling 100% it was nice to have a relaxing afternoon. Altogether, I don’t think the Cartagena mud volcano is exactly worth planning a trip around but if you’re in Cartagena for a few days it’s a fun little thing.
Returning to our hotel, the tour booking woman tried to sell us on a day excursion to the Rosario Islands, for around $200, I said I intended to go spend a few days there next, and she argued that all the hotels there were really expensive and that wasn’t a good idea. Which is why you should never trust such people when they’re trying to talk you into doing something more profitable for them, because, spoiler alert, there are lots of very affordable hotels on the Rosario Islands, but we’ll get there when we get there.
Day 2: City Tour & Castle
The next day we arranged for a city tour. A colorful open-sided bus picked us up as well as numerous other tourists from various hotels until it was full. Once again it was mostly people from Caribbean and Latin America but there was a young Hispanic couple from Los Angeles and a solitary man from New York who apparently just loves to travel.
The tour guides told us about the early history of Cartagena, the second European settlement (after Santa Marta, which we visit later) in what is now Colombia, built in a location that is both very defensible and commands a large deep water bay very useful for shipping. After the city fell prey to complete takeovers by pirates (1544) and by Sir Francis Drake (1586), heavy fortifications were built around the city. To this day impressive city walls surround much of the older part of town and strolling on the walls and watching the sunset from them is a popular local activity. By 1654 they had completed the largest castle in the Americas, Castle San Felipe de Barajas, often just called Cartagena Castle. It is distinct from “classical” castles in that it has notably slanted walls. This because they are for the most part the actual slope of the hill, and having been built to withstand cannonfire the slanting slope is advantageous. The tour divided up with a Spanish speaking guide guiding most of the group and an English speaking guide leading the three of us who preferred English. We explored the winding tunnels through the castle-hill: they were purposely built low since the Spaniards were typically a lot shorter than their English or Dutch enemies, and some tunnels wound around to dead ends to confuse and waste the time of attackers. Despite this impressive castle, it was captured and Cartagena again overrun in 1697 by a force of 4,000 French troops aided by 1,200 buccaneers.
It is also worth noting that Cartagena had an official royally sanctioned monopoly on the import of African slaves into Spanish South America. Unlike Elmina Castle they weren’t housed in the castle here, but having earlier visited slave camps in interior Ghana and then Elmina Castle where they were held before being onshipped to the Americas I feel like I’ve traced just about the entire slave trade route in the last few months. I suppose a visit to a former plantation is all that’s left. Though incidentally, at another museum in Colombia I came across a display about Palenqueros, which were camps and/or the people in them that consisted of escaped African and native slaves, and it sounds like some of these camps persisted longer and more openly than I had previously known about.
Our tour next led us on foot through this oldest part of town, which consisted of cute narrow streets in a grid, vibrantly painted buildings, ancient looking huge wooden doors, elegant overhanging balconies and beautiful bougainvilleas climbing up walls.
An iconic sight in old town Cartagena is the vibrantly dressed “palenqueras.” These days their primary activity is posing for photographs but traditionally they were fruit sellers in Cartagena. Thirty-one miles from Cartagena the palenque (free slave camp) of San Basilio de Palenque had become firmly established since 1619 and the women would make the long journey from there to sell fruit in Cartagena.
Cristina and I were by now looking for somewhere to eat but in such a tourist hot spot it was hard to find someplace genuinely good and not just overpriced. But as it happens a youngish woman approached us to try to pitch us tours, and by their accents Cristina and she immediately recognized they were both Venezuelan and immediately developed a camaraderie. We didn’t need to book any tours but asked her for a food recommendation and she walked us a few blocks to a place which was indeed delicious and not overly pricey.
That evening we watched the sunset from our hotel’s rooftop pool.
Day 3: Harbor Cruise
By Day 3 we already seem to have done everything there is to do in Cartagena other than a day trip to the Rosario Islands. The beaches in the immediate vicinity of Cartagena aren’t actually that great, with a clay-ey dark dirty looking sand. To be fair there’s various specific buildings or places in the city which are said to be worth seeing but didn’t excite us overly much. I would have liked to see the Museum de Oro, of indigenous gold artifacts, I’m not sure why we didn’t, and later regretted not getting around to trying “pizza cones” in Cartagena which we only learned about later. Which is all to say during the day we just relaxed around the hotel pool, and if you’re planning a Colombian vacation Cartagena is probably only worth three or four days.
That evening we signed up for a harbor cruise. We took a taxi to the commercial marina (at 6pm?). While we waited for our boat a fireworks display commenced just beside the castle (which was looming up behind us), not sure if this goes on every evening. As the light faded two traditionally rigged (pirate-ship looking) boats emerged from the darkness like phantoms, finishing their own earlier evening sails. I don’t know the name of the smaller brigantine-rigged one (I’m a boat nerd), but the larger barque-rigged ship I figured out is the “Barque Phantom.” If you want to go on a pirate cruise you could certainly do worse, I’ve seen lots of really tacky looking fake pirate ships but this vessel actually has all the rigging to be a functional 18th century sailing ship if they just put sails on her (she appears to presently be naked of actual sails).
Our own vessel turned out to be a modern looking boat of the white fiberglass variety but it was elegant and nice. We motored out into the bay and were served wine and a several course meal it was impressive they were able to prepare on such a small boat. Sitting beside us were two girls from Miami with fake eyelashes who couldn’t believe they couldn’t send their dinner back to the kitchen for something else. They also complained about the (one hour) time difference between Miami and Cartagena, life is hard.
The elegant boat, good food, pleasant weather, and the sparkling city skyline all around us made for a delightful romantic evening, we had a great time.
After this act of piracy, we naturally were ready the next morning to repair back to the very same docks, just past the statue of Catelina de India and board a boat to take us to the Isla del Piratas among the Rosario Islands, but that will be another story!
