Word: cartagena
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...risking your life for a vacation?" a close friend said with a gasp, aghast when I told her I planned to spend my postelection holiday in Cartagena, Colombia. In fact, few of my friends seemed to think it was a good idea: I couldn't persuade any of them to share my rental house in the city's walled Old Town. If they had heard of Cartagena at all, it was only as the backdrop of the classic 1980s romantic caper Romancing the Stone, a place of corrupt juntas and bodice-ripper-reading drug dealers - a parody turned deadly serious...
...draws people to it is its colonial Spanish soul, best captured perhaps in the novels of Gabriel García Márquez, its most famous resident. If you had any illusions that García Márquez's cilantro-spun stories were fictional, a few days in Cartagena will change your mind. One baby-faced cabdriver, looking as if he had just stepped off the pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, speaks of his 18 children and 30 grandchildren, many named some iteration of José. Characters like these aren't hard to find in Cartagena...
...Cartagena's Old Town was once ransomed to the Spanish crown for 2 million gold pieces by Sir Francis Drake, and it was for centuries Spain's vault for its vast South American holdings. The city earned the nickname La Heroica, having endured hundreds of sieges throughout the 17th and 18th centuries - as evidenced by the 400-year-old walls, made of mined coral, that encircle the city. But for all of Cartagena's battlements, in the modern era it has been plagued by crime, its potential as a UNESCO World Heritage site marred by kidnappings and murders. (See pictures...
...upon his election, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe made it a priority to secure Cartagena's walls. Emulating London, Uribe installed a 137-camera surveillance system that covers all of the Old Town and tourist areas. Murders dropped from 66 in 2002 to just 23 last year, 10 fewer than in my hometown of Washington. Uribe then lobbied Washington to declare the city safe for U.S. travel, a designation that opened the floodgates to cruise ships. In the past five years, foreign visitors to Colombia have more than doubled, from 1 million to 2.6 million a year. From...
...also duck in from the heat and visit any number of Cartagena's cultural gems - from the stunning Museo de Oro (Gold Museum, at Plaza Bolívar) and Museo de Arte Moderno (Museum of Modern Art, right off la Plaza de San Pedro) to the Cathedral, which offers an exhaustively comprehensive audio tour for $8. (I gave up after about 15 minutes.) There's also the delightfully twisted Palacio de la Inquisición, which, despite its grand name, is a tiny museum that features some of the many torture devices used to elicit confessions of witchcraft...