Cartagena, Colombia · South America

6 ideal things to do in Cartagena

The short list, pulled out of the long essay. No opening hours, because they change and I would only get them wrong — just what is worth your morning, roughly when to turn up, and where I have wasted time so you don’t have to.

By Ščenza

Last checked July 9, 2025

1. 01

   San Basilio de Palenque

   50 km inland, about ninety minutes each way·Morning, and with a guide from the village itself

   Around 1600 some thirty people who had escaped enslavement fortified a settlement in the hills behind Cartagena, beat off the force sent to retake them, and negotiated their freedom out of the Spanish crown. Their descendants are still there, about three and a half thousand of them, still speaking Palenquero — the only Spanish-based creole language in South America. UNESCO listed the cultural space in 2005. Go with somebody from the village and pay them properly; going without one is just looking at houses.

2. 02

   Cerro de la Popa

   The hill immediately behind the walled city·Late afternoon. The 2nd of February is the pilgrimage

   An Augustinian convent of 1607 on the only high ground for miles, named for looking like the stern of a galley. The cloister is white, planted, and a good deal cooler than the street below. From the parapet the whole argument is visible in one frame: old town, bay, container port, the towers of Bocagrande, and the neighbourhoods nobody photographs. Every 2 February people walk up at dawn for the Virgin of the Candelaria. Take a taxi, and agree the waiting arrangement before you get out.

3. 03

   Iglesia y Museo de San Pedro Claver

   Plaza San Pedro Claver, inside the walls·Morning, before the plaza turns into a griddle

   Pedro Claver was the Jesuit who went down to the docks to meet the slave ships and spent his life on the people coming off them. His body lies under the altar in a glass case, which is a lot to walk in on before coffee. The cloister around it is the museum. This is the one building inside the walls that makes you deal with what the walls were built to protect and what paid for them. Everything else in the old town is painted a beautiful colour. This is the ledger.

4. 04

   Las Bóvedas

   North wall, between the Santa Clara and Santa Catalina forts·The last hour of light, tacked onto a walk on the muralla

   Powder stores first, then cells: twenty-three bombproof vaults built into the north wall in the 1790s, and at high tide the men held in them stood in seawater up to the knee. Every arch is now a shop selling hammocks and souvenirs, which is a soft retirement for a dungeon. Go for the barrel vaults themselves and for the light coming through twenty-three identical openings at the end of the day. You are allowed to buy nothing. Nobody minds.

5. 05

   Playa Blanca on Isla Barú

   Barú, by road bridge or by boat·Stay a night, or arrive ahead of the day boats

   Two centuries ago the Canal del Dique cut Barú off the mainland and made it an island; a bridge has since put it back within driving distance. Playa Blanca is the beach everyone means, and for the middle of the day it belongs entirely to the day-trip boats coming over from the Rosarios. Either beat them there or sleep on the island and have the sand at first light, which is when it does the thing it is famous for. I did the day-boat version first, like everyone, and regretted it quietly on the way home.

6. 06

   Teatro Adolfo Mejía

   San Diego quarter, inside the walls·See what's on. Otherwise a daytime look inside

   Built on the footprint of a church of 1625, opened in 1911, and restored in the eighties into a seven-hundred-seat horseshoe with Italian marble stairs and Enrique Grau's nine muses spread across the ceiling. Cartagena gives you a great deal of colonial exterior and very little interior you are permitted into, and this is the exception. If there is a concert on, go, whatever it is. I sat through an evening of accordion music I understood almost none of and would book it again tomorrow.