The best-preserved colonial walled city in the Americas, on a warm Caribbean Sea
Cartagena de Indias is Colombia's most beautiful city — the Ciudad Amurallada (Walled City) is a UNESCO World Heritage maze of 400-year-old Spanish colonial buildings, bougainvillea-draped balconies, and cobblestone streets where very little has structurally changed since the 17th century. The heat is tropical and permanent; the food is Caribbean Colombian — fried empanadas, arepa de huevo (egg-stuffed fried corn cake eaten for breakfast), fresh ceviche at beach shacks, and coconut rice as the default starch with everything. Garcia Márquez grew up 120km away in Aracataca and set One Hundred Y…
Founded in 1533 by Pedro de Heredia, Cartagena became the most important port in Spanish America — the embarkation point for gold and silver looted from the entire Viceroyalty of New Granada. The Spanish built the Castillo San Felipe de Barajas, the largest Spanish fortification in the Americas, to defend it. The city was also a major hub of the transatlantic slave trade; enslaved Africans brought to work Colombian gold and silver mines passed through Cartagena, leaving cultural traces in cuisine, music (cumbia, porro), and Afro-Colombian identity that define the city today.