I adopted the inexperienced parrot down Calle de la Inquisición and into Plaza Bolívar. It sat neatly on the shoulder of a stern-looking aged girl carrying a full-length night robe. The parrot spoke quickly and with what appeared like nice authority at nearly all passers-by, pausing solely to concern himself together with his reflection within the window of a bookstore earlier than venturing indoors, by no means to be seen once more.
This, expensive reader, is Cartagena, the place the surreal lurks within the shadows of the on a regular basis. A metropolis the place vines as thick as your arm encase crumbling, sherbet-toned mansions, the place grass-green iguanas amble slowly by means of the parks and the place palenqueras sway by means of the streets in full Afro-Colombian regalia, baskets of fruit balanced precariously upon their heads. Cartagena is a metropolis the place the magical and the mundane are straightforward bedfellows and the place the reality, it appears, is stranger than fiction.
‘Surrealism runs by means of the streets,’ declared Gabriel García Márquez, Colombia’s most beloved novelist. ‘Surrealism comes from the fact of Latin America.’ Gabo, as he’s identified in these components, would know – he spent his youth as a journalist and lawyer in Cartagena and it’s right here, amongst these shady, flower-filled lanes and leafy, colonnaded plazas, that he developed his much-imitated type of ‘magic realism’, integrating components of fantasy into in any other case reasonable settings.
Based by Pedro de Heredia in 1533, Cartagena de Los Indios was one of the essential Spanish colonial cities within the New World throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its maze of Crayola-coloured colonial homes, the UNESCO-protected Ciudad Amurallada, is intentionally complicated to navigate, designed to confound marauding Caribbean pirates.
Inside this walled metropolis – a visceral playground of latticework balconies, samba-steeped bars and tumultuous road markets – the ambiance is paying homage to the heady, historic attract of outdated Havana. Cobbled streets clatter to the sound of horse-drawn carriages, moustachioed elders sip thick black espresso and the hypnotic beat of percussion permeates the air.
This steamy, sultry mezcla is Cartagena’s calling card, a siren track that’s laborious to withstand. But for all its marvel, its vitality and its color, it is a metropolis that has endured numerous years of ache, isolation and looting, as unimaginable wealth – some earned, a lot stolen – rode out and in on the waves of centuries. It’s a duality that prompted Gabo himself to muse that, ‘Regardless of the oppression, the plundering and the abandonment, we reply with life’.
To the outsider, Cartagena seems culturally decadent, with a vibrant literary and inventive heritage steeped in folklore and mythology, together with a thriving up to date attract. The town’s historical past is influenced by a mix of Indigenous, African, European and Caribbean traditions and its strategic location as a significant port within the Caribbean made it a hub of cultural change. Many distinguished literary figures and artists from the colonial interval have been drawn to Cartagena, when town was identified for its vibrant non secular and secular artwork. Rafael Nuñez, a distinguished Colombian poet, author, and politician, was born in Cartagena in 1825. He’s greatest identified for each composing the lyrics to Colombia’s nationwide anthem and serving because the nation’s president.
García Márquez was born within the close by city of Aracataca in 1927. Whereas not a local of Cartagena itself, his works, together with Love within the Time of Cholera and Of Love and Different Demons, have been closely influenced by the magical realism of the Caribbean coast and Cartagena’s geography and historic context characteristic prominently in his writing. ‘All of my books have free threads of Cartagena in them,’ Gabo as soon as stated. ‘And, with time, after I should name up recollections, I at all times carry again an incident from Cartagena, a spot in Cartagena, a personality in Cartagena. There’s at all times any individual or one thing from that metropolis.’
At the moment, town is within the throes of yet one more cultural and inventive revolution, its flower-filled lanes and colonnaded plazas thronging with a bohemian, bookish set who flock to town’s many libraries, literary salons and festivals – the Cartagena version of the Hay Pageant is now in its eighteenth yr. In up-and-coming Getsemaní, a vibrant barrio simply past the partitions of the Outdated City partitions that’s quietly been repositioning itself as town’s coolest counterculture quartier, we discover the gritty, rum-soaked Cartagena that Márquez first fell for, together with a thriving artwork scene that encompasses galleries, museums and superlative road artwork.
Getsemani can be dwelling to a few of the metropolis’s most fun locations to eat, akin to Celele, whose tropical-modern tackle Colombian Caribbean – a delicacies that cherry picks from the area’s multi-layered Indigenous, Spanish and Caribbean heritage – simply bought voted one in all Latin America’s 50 greatest eating places.
Cartagena’s attract is plentiful year-round, however it’s throughout the festive season that town actually ramps up the allure, as creaking picket doorways are flung open to disclose noble mansions the place glitteringly rich old-world aristocrats throw equally glittering events and dance till daybreak beneath the Outdated City partitions.
For artistic director Yasmin Sabet, whose superlative Casa Manantial sits on the coronary heart of Cartagena’s casco viejo, it’s probably the most thrilling time to go to. ‘I like December and January as a result of all my family and friends go to throughout this time. It’s the most effective time to satisfy the locals! We spend lengthy days by the pool and eat lazy lunches, then after a scrumptious siesta we’d meet for a late supper at La Vitriola, which is a kind of locations I return to over and over. It has reside music and an actual old-school tropical vibe and killer cocktails. That’s what Cartagena is about – a sensory mixture of the outdated and the brand new.’
Sabet, who’s half Colombian, half Egyptian and was raised between Cartagena and the USA, has created a house that is without doubt one of the metropolis’s most extraordinary buildings, an achingly stunning restored palacio that’s art-filled and luminous and steeped in colonial allure. Richly layered and endlessly eclectic, the home is stashed with antiques and objets d’artwork sourced on Sabet’s personal travels, and is centred round a lush, foliage-filled courtyard the place tropical ferns solid dappled shade on a discreet and chic pool. Books are stacked excessive on tables and studying nooks abound, clad in vintage textiles and pillows from indigenous artisans.
When all this sumptuousness turns into an excessive amount of, Sabet’s friends can escape to the seas, hightailing it on her personal boat to the tropical peninsula of Isla Barú, the place the household’s waterfront Casa Ceiba awaits. ‘It’s an actual paradise away from all of the noise, an absolute escape and the place I loosen up probably the most. That complete coast is suffused with recollections of my childhood and is like no different place I do know, a completely completely different world to town itself. To do one you actually should do the opposite.’
For me, it’s exactly this dizzying dichotomy that defines this most dreamlike of coastal cities. The place riotous, rum-soaked barrios rub up towards luxurious tropical backwaters, the place the inexplicable and the mental go hand-in-hand and the place, in response to García Marquéz, ‘town’s silence is diaphanous within the 4 o’clock warmth, and thru the bed room window one can see the define of the outdated city with the afternoon solar at its again, its golden domes, its sea in flames all the best way to Jamaica.’
Discover out extra about Casa Manantial and Casa Ceiba
Maya Boyd is an award-winning Ibiza-based journalist, editor and model guide. She has written a number of books about Ibiza and Formentera, together with Assouline’s best-selling espresso desk guide, Ibiza Bohemia, and is each the editorial director of L’Officiel Ibiza and a contributor at Condé Nast Traveller. She lives within the north of Ibiza together with her husband and three kids.
