Walled City & Getsemaní

Cartagena's walled city is the Spanish Caribbean's masterpiece kept under glass: four square kilometres of sixteenth-to-eighteenth-century streets inside eleven kilometres of coral-stone fortification, built after Francis Drake held the city to ransom in 1586 convinced the Crown that Cartagena — the treasure port where Andes silver met the fleet — needed walls nothing could breach. Nothing ever did. What survived inside them is the most complete colonial old town in the Americas: balconies dripping bougainvillea over streets built for two horses abreast, convent domes, plazas that change character by the hour, and a heat that enforces the local rhythm — mornings and evenings for walking, mid-afternoon for shade and lime juice.

The circuit writes itself but rewards a guide, because every pretty corner has a hard story: the Plaza de los Coches' arcades were the slave market — the guided walks handle this history with the seriousness it demands — while the Palace of the Inquisition's baroque doorway opens onto its literal torture museum, and Gabriel García Márquez's Cartagena (he lived, wrote and set half his books here) shadows every guided route worth taking. San Pedro Claver's church holds the remains of the priest who met the slave ships for forty years; the wall-top walk from Baluarte Santo Domingo — sunset with the Caribbean on one side and the domes on the other — is the free grand finale, Café del Mar's cocktails optional.

Getsemaní, the neighbourhood just outside the walls, is the counterweight and increasingly the point: the former working-class barrio whose Calle de la Sierpe murals, umbrella-canopied Callejón Angosto and Plaza de la Trinidad — where the whole quarter convenes at dusk around street food, break-dancers and domino tables — deliver the living city the walled town's boutique-hotel perfection sometimes polishes away. The combined walking tours run both in one arc, correctly: the postcard first, then the pulse. Craft: morning tours beat the heat, a hat and water are non-negotiable, evening returns for the plazas' second life, and taxis by app after midnight — standard city sense, nothing more.