I Almost Left Cartagena on Day Two — Then a Plastic Chair in Getsemaní Changed Everything
The taxi driver wanted 60,000 pesos to take me from Rafael Núñez airport to the old town. About fifteen dollars. I knew — because I'd been reading my phone in the immigration line like a nervous freshman — that the ride should run closer to 18,000. So I said no. He shrugged, glanced at my backpack, muttered something about , and walked off. It was 1 in the afternoon. The heat was already sitting on me like a wet dog that refused to move.
el sol
That was my first ten minutes in Cartagena. By hour four, I'll be honest, I was quietly checking flight prices to Medellín — or Colombia's cooler highland capital, or honestly anywhere with air conditioning.
The part where I didn't get it
Here's the thing nobody warns you about: the postcard version of Cartagena and the actual experience of arriving in Cartagena are two very different animals.
The postcard is pastel walls and bougainvillea and a woman in a yellow dress balancing a bowl of mango on her head. The arrival is 33°C with humidity that turns your shirt translucent in eight minutes, a wall of people near the Torre del Reloj clock tower trying to sell you sunglasses, cigars, emeralds, boat tours, and "my friend, where you from," all at once, all in the same breath. Some of those boat tours, it turns out, are multi-day Caribbean sailing trips down to Panama's Bocas del Toro; on day one, though, all I wanted was shade.
I walked into the Walled City through the main arch and it was beautiful — genuinely, stupidly beautiful — and I felt almost nothing. Plaza Santo Domingo had the famous reclining Botero statue (locals call her Gertrudis) and a ring of restaurants charging 45,000 pesos for a mediocre ceviche. A palenquera offered to pose for a photo and then asked for 20,000 pesos after I'd already taken it, which is fair enough, that's her job, but it left me feeling like a walking ATM with a sunburn.
I bought a limonada de coco — coconut limeade, the unofficial drink of the city — from a cart for 8,000 pesos and drank it in about four seconds. Then I bought another one. The whole afternoon had this quality of being inside a movie set built for other people. Lovely to look at. Hard to touch.
Day two I did the dutiful tourist circuit. Castillo San Felipe de Barajas, the big hilltop fortress, which is honestly incredible — those tunnels, the cannons pointed at a sea that hasn't seen an invader in centuries — but I climbed it at 11 AM like an idiot and nearly cooked. Entry was 30,000 pesos. Worth it. Just go at 8 when it opens, not when the sun is trying to murder you.
By that evening I was sitting on the city walls near Café del Mar watching the sunset with a few hundred other phones, and a waiter wanted 38,000 pesos (about nine bucks) for a single cocktail. I said no to that too. I bought an Águila beer from a guy with a styrofoam cooler for 5,000 and drank it on the ramparts with my feet hanging over the edge, which is the move, by the way — skip the bar, the wall is free and the sunset is the same. But even with the cheap beer and the gold light, I sat there thinking: I think I've made a mistake. I think this city isn't for me.
The turn
It was the guy at my hostel front desk who fixed it. Twenty-something, Cartagenero, watched me drag myself in looking defeated and asked how my day was. I gave him the polite version. He gave me a look.
"You've been in the Centro the whole time," he said. Not a question. "Tonight, go to Getsemaní. Plaza de la Trinidad. After nine. Bring small bills and don't bring an attitude."
Getsemaní is the neighborhood just outside the main walls — for centuries the working-class barrio, the one the guidebooks used to tell you to avoid and now can't stop writing about. It's a ten-minute walk from the Clock Tower and somehow a different planet. The streets get narrower. The umbrellas strung overhead turn the alleys into ceilings of color. Calle de la Sierpe and Callejón Angosto are covered wall to wall in murals — not the sanitized kind, the kind with teeth.
And Plaza de la Trinidad, the little square in front of the 17th-century church, is where the whole neighborhood goes to exist at night.
I got there around 9:30. And I finally got it.
The plaza
There is no entrance fee to Plaza de la Trinidad. There is no host, no velvet rope, no English menu. What there is: a few hundred people sitting on the church steps and the curb and dozens of red plastic chairs that materialize from somebody's living room. Vendors working coolers of beer for 4,000 pesos. A woman frying arepas de huevo — cornmeal pockets with a whole egg cracked inside, deep-fried, 5,000 pesos — and I ate three.
Kids were playing a furious game of soccer using two backpacks as a goal. An old man in a pristine guayabera shirt was dancing champeta — the Afro-Colombian sound that actually belongs to this coast, all hips and bass — completely alone and completely unbothered, while a speaker the size of a refrigerator did its best to vibrate the church off its foundations.
I sat down on a curb next to a couple from Barranquilla who'd driven in for the weekend. They didn't try to sell me anything. They asked where I was from, shared their bottle of rum, corrected my Spanish gently, and laughed at me when I claimed I could dance. (I cannot dance.) Somebody's grandmother passed around fried plantain. A street performer did a fire-breathing thing that was probably a safety violation in nine ways and the whole plaza cheered anyway.
Nobody here was performing Cartagena for me. They were just living in it, and they'd left the door open.
Around midnight a group of us drifted to Café Havana, the legendary salsa bar a few blocks over — cover was about 40,000 pesos, the band was a ten-piece machine, and the room was so hot the walls were sweating along with everyone. I lasted until nearly three. I have no idea who half the people I danced with were. It was the best night I'd had in months.
What I got wrong
The next morning, hungover and human again, the whole city looked different. I went to Bazurto Market — the big, loud, gloriously chaotic local market southeast of the center, the one most tourists never see — and ate a bowl of cazuela de mariscos (seafood stew) for 25,000 pesos at a plastic table while a butcher argued cheerfully with a fishmonger two feet away. I went back to La Cevichería, the place Anthony Bourdain made famous, and yeah it's touristy now and there's a line, but the ceviche really is that good, so I made my peace with that too.
Here's what I'd been getting wrong: I'd treated Cartagena like a museum I was supposed to admire from behind glass. The Walled City is gorgeous, but it's the lobby. The actual life of the place happens in the plastic chairs after dark, in a barrio that doesn't care whether you show up — which is exactly why it feels so good when you do.
I'd planned three nights. I stayed six. I almost left on day two because I'd shown up expecting the city to come to me, dressed up and grateful for my visit. It doesn't work like that here.
You have to walk to Getsemaní, find a curb, buy the warm beer, and sit down like you've got nowhere else to be. Then Cartagena leans over, hands you a fried arepa, and tells you to stay one more night.
