Getsemaní, Cartagena

Where it sits. Cartagena de Indias stands on Colombia's Caribbean coast, on a set of low sandy islands and spits enclosing a deep double-mouthed bay that made it one of the safest harbours in the Spanish empire. The walled old town — the Centro Histórico, with its inner districts of Centro and San Diego — sits directly behind eleven kilometres of coral-stone rampart, with the former artisans' and free-Black quarter of Getsemaní just across a filled-in channel and the high-rise beach strip of Bocagrande on the peninsula beyond. Streets inside the walls are narrow, deliberately shaded, and laid out to catch the sea breeze; balconies overhang them, heavy with bougainvillea. The heat is constant, around 28–32°C year-round, and the town's rhythm follows it: dead at two in the afternoon, alive again at six.

The story behind it. Pedro de Heredia founded the city on 1 June 1533 on the site of the Indigenous settlement of Calamarí. It became the main Caribbean depot for silver bound for Seville and, brutally, the principal slave-trading port of Spanish South America — several hundred thousand enslaved Africans were landed here. That wealth attracted repeated attack; after Francis Drake sacked the city in 1586 and left with a vast ransom, the Crown began the fortification programme that produced the walls and the great hill fort of San Felipe de Barajas, begun in 1657 and hugely enlarged by the engineer Antonio de Arévalo after 1762. Cartagena declared independence in 1811, endured a starvation siege in 1815, and was named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1984.

On screen. Cartagena's walled core has been an international film location since Gillo Pontecorvo shot Burn! here in 1968 with Marlon Brando. Its most complete screen portrait is Mike Newell's Love in the Time of Cholera (2007), adapted from Gabriel García Márquez, who worked as a young reporter for El Universal in this city and whose fictional port merges Cartagena with Barranquilla. Roughly four fifths of that film was shot on location here:

• Las Bóvedas, the arcaded vaults of the 1790s built into the ramparts, dressed as a working market
• Plaza de Bolívar and the Palacio de la Inquisición for street and civic scenes
• The church and square of San Pedro Claver, named for the Jesuit who ministered to the enslaved
• A period telegraph office constructed on top of the Baluarte de San Lucas, on the sea wall itself

Netflix's Narcos also worked in Cartagena among several Colombian cities, though the series staged most of its Medellín material in Bogotá. And the film that made "Cartagena" a byword for tropical adventure, Romancing the Stone (1984), never came near it — its Colombia was shot entirely in Mexico.

What you actually see today. You can walk long stretches of the ramparts, particularly the sunset section around the Baluarte de Santo Domingo. Inside them, the Torre del Reloj gate opens onto Plaza de los Coches, once the slave market and now a row of sweet stalls; the vast Plaza de la Aduana holds the mayor's office; Plaza Santo Domingo has Botero's reclining Gertrudis in bronze. Getsemaní, long working-class and now rapidly gentrifying, is where the street art, the plaza-side salsa and the hostels are, centred on Plaza de la Trinidad. Above the city, the 17th-century Convento de la Popa on its 150-metre hill gives the best overview of bay, walls and skyline.

Beyond the walls. The city beaches are unremarkable; the water gets clear about an hour out. Boats from the Muelle de la Bodeguita run to the Islas del Rosario, a coral archipelago protected as a national park, and to Playa Blanca on Barú. Inland, the Volcán del Totumo mud crater is a well-worn day trip. More rewarding is San Basilio de Palenque, an hour south-east — founded by escaped enslaved people around 1600, the first free Black town in the Americas, with its own creole language, Palenquero, and UNESCO recognition for its oral and musical traditions.

Getting there and timing. Rafael Núñez International Airport is barely ten minutes from the walled city, with connections across the Americas and Europe. December to April is dry and breezy; October is the wettest month, and the harbour humidity peaks in September. Independence week around 11 November fills the streets with parades and cabildos. Old-town streets are largely flat but paved in uneven stone with high kerbs and few ramps, so wheelchair travel needs planning. Prices inside the walls are the highest in Colombia; Getsemaní and the neighbourhoods east of it are considerably cheaper for both food and rooms.