By Colin Barraclough in The Financial Times
Lounging by a pool of translucent ultramarine, I sipped a well-mixed mojito and gazed at a shower of bougainvillea blooms that matched the peach-hued campanile of Cartagena’s cathedral in the street opposite. A skyline of towers and latticed balconies overlooked the azure Caribbean Sea beyond.

The hotel, housed within a 17th-century mansion of jaw-dropping heft, boasted indulgently lavish rooms, scattered with mahogany furniture, Chinese porcelain and zebra-skin rugs. A brace of royal palms shaded a fern-carpeted courtyard.
The night before, I had strolled through the quiet streets of Cartagena, a once-illustrious port on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, passing 300-year-old colonial Spanish palaces, churches and mansions, all washed in delicate shades of ochre, peach, and sunflower.
After dining al fresco in a leafy square, I had sat among a throng of students, buskers and tourists to enjoy the balmy night air.
There will be many more tourists like me this year. Cartagena is gearing up for an avalanche of visitors as the first major movie shot in the city for two decades goes on release. The film version of Love in the Time of Cholera, the much-read tale of unrequited love by Colombia’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez, was released in the US in November, and appears in British cinemas on March 21.
Just as vacationers flocked to Argentina and Chile following Walter Salles’ portrayal of Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries, the motion picture version of Márquez’s novel looks set to focus international interest on the city where the author himself worked as a cub reporter in the 1950s.
Once akin to Old Havana, decadent in crumbling splendour, Cartagena, a Unesco World Heritage Site, is already enjoying a much-needed makeover on the back of a tourism upswing.
Its walled Old City, once Spain’s finest colonial outpost in the Americas, has been restored to its past grandeur. Boutique hotels have been carved from colonial-era townhouses, and long-neglected wooden-framed buildings are now washed in delicate shades of peach, mustard and sunflower yellow, their balconies bedecked with camellias.
The city has come a long way since Colombia’s darkest days, when guerrilla warfare and narcotics trafficking plunged the country into a seemingly endless cycle of violence. For decades, it was rightly considered too dangerous for all but the hardiest traveller.
Yet peace of a kind has broken out, and canny visitors are returning – in record numbers, in fact. Exploiting a lull in the country’s internecine strife, 2m vacationers arrived in 2006.
Much of this recovery can be attributed to Colombian president Álvaro Uribe, whose campaign against armed groups has posted dramatic results. Since winning office in 2002, Uribe has beaten the guerrillas back to their jungle hideouts, securing a dramatic fall in violence: in the first two years of his mandate, murders dropped by 40 per cent, bombings by 66 per cent and kidnappings by 79 per cent. Even the cautious US State Department noted last June that “violence has continued to decrease markedly in most urban areas, including Cartagena”.
The city itself displays the story of three centuries of imperial Spanish rule. Founded in 1533, it was used as a storehouse for treasure plundered by the Spanish from South America. Gold, silver, and rare stones were collected within its massive forts until Spain’s galleons could be mustered to ship them to Europe. Laden with riches, Cartagena thus presented a tempting target for the pirate crews that pillaged the Caribbean coast.
Visitors find 11km of elaborate fortifications – built in belated response to a pirate attack in 1586, when Francis Drake besieged the city for a hundred days – encircling street after picturesque street, each lined with 400-year-old palaces, churches and townhouses, all bathed in Caribbean sunlight.
So rich is the city’s historical legacy, in fact, that it is treated almost casually. The cathedral, for instance, still bears the scars of cannon fire from Drake’s ships, while the Palacio de la Inquisición,once the seat of the Holy Office’s Punishment Tribunal, now functions as a grisly museum of medieval religious torture.
At the Convento de San Pedro Claver, named after a 17th-century monk canonised for his ministry to Colombia’s slaves, tourists can visit the cell where the Jesuit saint lived and died.
Exploring the Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas, Spain’s largest American fort, I scurried through tunnels that lace beneath its impregnable bulk. The tunnels, which connect the fort’s strategic points, were designed to accentuate sounds, allowing defending soldiers to hear an attacking enemy’s faintest footstep. The idea clearly worked, as the castle was never taken by force.
Yet I found it easiest to discard a set itinerary in favour of an aimless ramble – the city’s monumental ramparts, so extensive they were completed just 25 years before Colombia’s independence, prevent the stroller from wandering into less salubrious areas that lie beyond the Old City.
I strolled out each morning with little purpose, content simply to wander the maze of cobbled alleyways, leafy plazas, and shadowed back streets. Along the way, I developed a taste for ajiaco, a staple Colombian stew of chicken, potato, corn and capers. As I settled down to eat it, I would have elbow plate space for myself at lunchtime cantinas crowded with locals, and striking up a rapport with the Afro-Colombian saleswomen who sell tiny corn pancakes called arepa from trays they carry on their heads.
The quintessential Cartagena nocturnal experience is a simple affair: it’s difficult to beat sipping an ice-cold Club Colombia beer on Plaza San Diego, where restaurant tables spill into the street, artists peddle homemade jewellery, and strolling guitarists strum Colombian ballads as much for their own pleasure as for a handful of coins.
On sultry nights – and every night in Cartagena seems to be sultry – locals mingle at al fresco bars situated on the ramparts, where 17th-century stone turrets now house DJ booths.
And then, of course, there’s Márquez. Cartagena has long been associated with Colombia’s most-popular author and his presence is strongly felt: locals frequently mention his name, affectionately calling him “Gabo”, while many of the city’s notable buildings became famous through his books.
The 1617-built Convent of Santa Clara de Assisi, for instance, now one of the city’s most elegant hotels, provided the setting for his 1994 novel Of Love and Other Demons.
Oddly, perhaps, Márquez himself rarely visits Cartagena: disapproving of Colombia’s strident politics, he has spent most of his adult life in Mexico. Yet he opted to celebrate his 80th birthday, which fell in March last year, at the modernist red-stucco villa he still owns, overlooking Cartagena’s ramparts and the turquoise Caribbean beyond.
Perhaps Gabo’s ethereal presence is appropriate in a way. After all, Colombia itself has existed, yet not existed, for years; ever-present in news headlines, it has been next-to-impossible to see at first hand. Now, both on-screen and as a compelling destination, Cartagena, like Gabo, may finally be returning to the realm of the real.
On location in Cartagena
Hollywood’s take on Love in the Time of Cholera may anger literary purists on its release this month. “We’ll certainly take some black eyes,” admits British-born director Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral), “partly for doing it in English but mostly for having tried in the first place. A lot of people believe you shouldn’t touch holy work.”
Gabriel García Márquez, near-deified by admirers of South American literature, has long resisted turning his novels into cinema. It took three years of wooing before producer Scott Steindorff finally wrested a deal from Márquez for the film rights to his 1985 novel. Initially planning to shoot the film in Brazil, Steindorff now says he’s grateful that Colombian authorities persuaded him to switch to Cartagena.
“Colombia’s vice-president, Francisco Santos Calderón, asked us to take a look at Cartagena,” says Steindorff. “Mike Newell and I went down, and we loved it. It’s one of the most romantic cities in the world. It has this charm and beauty, and it’s the authentic location for the story.”
Newell was initially reluctant to shoot in a city with such obvious logistical difficulties. “When Scott told me we were going to Colombia, I thought, ‘Drugs and guns!’ ” recounts Newell. “Curiously, though, I never felt any danger. It was my first time in Latin America, yet I felt very safe.”
Shooting in Cartagena, a city Newell found both “authentic and very old indeed, yet beautifully preserved”, allowed the director to choose locations that closely matched Márquez’s novelistic settings.
The plot, loosely based on the story of Márquez’s own parents, follows the incurable romantic Florentino Ariza (played by Javier Bardem), who loses the love of his life, Fermina Daza, (played by Giovanna Mezzogiorno), but devotes the following half-century preparing for the day he might once again have her.
Cartagena has hosted a number of major film shoots in the past, including the 1968 thriller Burn!, starring Marlon Brando, and the Academy Award-winning The Mission. Grace Kelly even filmed Green Fire there in the 1950s. As the first big film shot in the city since the 1980s, however, Love in the Time of Cholera is likely to generate a significant buzz.
Cartagena locations used in ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’
Convento de San Pedro Claver
In the film, this bombastic monastery is used for Fermina Daza’s marriage to the punctilious doctor Juvenal Urbino (played by Benjamin Bratt).
Casa del Marqués de Valdehoyos
Independence hero Simón Bolívar found sanctuary in what was once the city’s largest private residence, which features in the film as home to Fermina’s father, Lorenzo Daza.
Escuela de Bellas Artes (Fine Arts School)
The exterior of Cartagena’s colonial-era Fine Arts School served as the college where Florentino Ariza picks up América Vicuña. Scenes featuring Fermina Daza’s school were filmed in the interior.
Fuerte de la Tenaza (Tenaza Fort)
In the film, the 15m-thick walls of this fort masquerade as a boat dock, where Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza embark on their honeymoon cruise.
Teatro Heredia
With its ornate gold-leaf interior and excellent acoustics, this stunning theatre provided a location for a poetry competition.
Published: March 1 2008 00:19 | Last updated: March 1 2008 00:19