The river island city where time stopped — García Márquez's Macondo made real, colonial filigree goldsmithing, and the most isolated UNESCO city in Colombia
Mompox (officially Santa Cruz de Mompox) is a UNESCO World Heritage city on an island in the Magdalena River in northern Colombia — 200km south of Cartagena, accessible only by a combination of road and river ferry, and so isolated that it remains one of the least-visited colonial cities in the Americas despite being one of the most beautiful. The entire city is a collection of colonial churches (six of them, for a population of 40,000) and 16th–18th-century whitewashed townhouses with bougainvillea balconies, none more than two storeys, lining streets that flood periodically when the Magdale…
Mompox was founded in 1537 on an island in the Magdalena River and became the most important inland port in colonial Colombia — every shipment between Cartagena (the Caribbean port) and Bogotá (the capital) passed through Mompox on the river route. Simón Bolívar spent time here recruiting for the independence campaign in 1812 ('If to Caracas I owe my life, to Mompox I owe my glory' — a quote inscribed on the city's cathedral). The city's decline was accelerated by the silting of the western Magdalena branch in the 19th century, which redirected river traffic and left Mompox stranded — economi…