Colombia's carnival city — where the Magdalena meets the sea
Barranquilla is Colombia's fourth city and the country's most underrated — a hot, chaotic Caribbean port where Gabriel García Márquez grew up, where Shakira was born, and where every February the Carnaval de Barranquilla turns the entire city into one of the world's great street parties (UNESCO Intangible Heritage since 2003). The food here is Caribbean-inflected Colombian: fried carimañolas, seafood sancocho, and cold Club Colombia beer on a Sunday afternoon watching vallenato in a barrio park.
Barranquilla was founded in 1629 near the mouth of the Río Magdalena, which was Colombia's main transport artery and the reason the city became the country's principal port in the 19th century. Waves of Arab, Jewish, German, Italian, and Lebanese immigrants arrived through Barranquilla from the 1870s onwards — the city's open, cosmopolitan character is rooted in this mix. The first commercial airport in the Americas opened here in 1919. García Márquez set parts of 'Love in the Time of Cholera' in a fictionalised version of the city, and the river-port atmosphere of magical realism he captured…