Caribbean Rhythm in Cartagena

The Colour and the Heat

Cartagena announces itself in colour the way other cities announce themselves in architecture or skyline — not with a single landmark but with an accumulation of hue so persistent, so saturated, so completely unreasonable that by the second day your eyes have recalibrated and the world outside this city will look faded for weeks afterward. The colonial facades of the walled city are painted in colours that have no business existing on the same street — canary yellow beside electric blue beside terracotta beside mint green beside a magenta so vivid it seems to hum at a frequency just above hearing. And every balcony drips with bougainvillea, cascading down the ironwork in waterfalls of fuchsia and orange and white that add another layer of colour to walls already oversaturated.

I walked through the walled city on my first morning at seven, before the heat became a physical obstacle. The streets were narrow, cobblestoned, and still cool in the shadow of buildings that leaned toward each other across the gap as though sharing secrets. Doors stood open — massive wooden doors studded with brass, the kind that were built to repel pirates and now stand ajar to admit the morning air — and through them I caught glimpses of courtyards with tiled fountains, potted palms, rocking chairs arranged for conversations that would begin at dusk and end whenever someone decided to walk home. A woman swept her doorstep with a straw broom. A man balanced a tower of fruit on his head — mangoes, papayas, pineapples — and walked without apparent effort down the uneven stones, calling out his inventory in a singsong that was half commerce and half music.

The heat arrived at nine. Not gradually — it stepped through a door. One moment the air was warm and pleasant. The next it was thick, wet, a substance you wore rather than breathed, carrying the smell of the Caribbean and frying plantain and diesel from the buses that circled the walls. By ten the streets were in full operation — vendors selling empanadas from carts, tour groups following raised umbrellas, a man playing vallenato on an accordion outside the cathedral while his partner shook a guacharaca — a ridged wooden instrument that sounds like a cricket given amplification and rhythm. The music was everywhere. Not background music, not street performance for tourists, but the sound of a city that has been set to music for five hundred years and does not know how to exist in silence.

Getsemaní After Dark

If the walled city is Cartagena's postcard, Getsemaní is its pulse. The neighbourhood outside the main wall was historically home to the city's working class — artisans, fishermen, the descendants of enslaved Africans whose labour built the very walls that excluded them — and its identity has been shaped by that history into something rawer and more honest than the polished colonial centre. The walls are covered in murals. The plazas are filled with plastic chairs and domino games. The music coming from the open doors is not vallenato but champeta — an Afro-Colombian genre built on African rhythms and Caribbean bass that hits you in the hips before it reaches your ears.

I walked into Getsemaní at nine in the evening and the transformation was already underway. Plaza de la Trinidad — the neighbourhood's central square, named for the church at one end — was a living room without walls. Families sat on the church steps. Teenagers practiced cumbia steps on the cobblestones. A woman sold coconut rice and fried fish from a cart that smelled so good I changed my dinner plans on the spot. The fish was whole — crispy skin, white flesh, seasoned with garlic and lime and something I could not identify that turned out to be ají dulce, a sweet pepper that is to Cartagena what basil is to Genoa, present in everything, indispensable, invisible until someone points it out.

From the plaza I followed the sound of drums to a bar with no sign and no door — just an opening in a wall that led to a courtyard where a band was playing salsa to a crowd of maybe eighty people, most of them dancing, none of them performing for anyone but themselves. The brass was tight. The percussion was relentless. The dancers moved with a fluency that made the connection between sound and body seem inevitable, as though the music was not being heard but physically transmitted through the floor and up through the feet and into the hips and shoulders. A woman pulled me off my stool and into the crowd and attempted to teach me a basic step that my body processed as a series of unrelated movements while hers processed it as breathing. I lasted three songs. She lasted the entire night. The music did not stop until two in the morning, and when it did the silence felt wrong, like a heartbeat missing.

Floating in Glass

The speedboat to the Rosario Islands covered the distance in forty minutes, hammering over Caribbean swells that sent spray across the bow and turned the city behind us into a white smudge on the horizon. Then the water changed. The deep blue of open sea gave way to the turquoise of shallows, and the turquoise gave way to a clarity so absolute that the concept of "underwater" became approximate — the fish were not beneath the surface so much as suspended in a medium that happened to be water, their shadows sharp on the white sand ten feet below, their colours — electric blue, neon yellow, barred black and white — so vivid they looked painted.

I snorkelled for two hours and forgot about time entirely. The reef was modest by Pacific standards — no vast coral walls or cathedral formations — but what it lacked in scale it compensated for in intimacy. The coral heads were scattered across the sand like boulders in a field, each one hosting its own community — parrotfish grazing the surface, a moray eel peering from a crevice with the expression of someone who has been disturbed during a nap, a school of blue tang that moved as a single cloud, shifting direction with a unanimity that suggested either telepathy or a choreographer I could not see. A sea turtle drifted past at the edge of visibility, its flippers moving in slow, deliberate strokes that made swimming look like a form of meditation. It did not acknowledge me. I did not deserve acknowledgment. I was a visitor in a world that had been running without me for millennia, and the appropriate response was to float, and watch, and breathe through a tube, and marvel at the fact that this much beauty existed forty minutes from a city where people were, at that very moment, arguing over domino games and frying plantain.

Back on the island, I ate ceviche on the beach. The fish had been caught that morning. The lime was squeezed fresh. The coconut rice was cooked in the milk of coconuts that grew on the palms above my head. The simplicity was the point — five ingredients, no cooking beyond the citric acid denaturing the protein, no technique beyond the grandmother who made it knowing exactly how long to let the fish sit in the lime, a knowledge she carried the way Don Valentín carried mezcal and Doña Esperanza carried mole, in the body rather than on paper, transmitted by proximity and repetition across generations. She served it in a styrofoam bowl with a plastic fork and it was the best ceviche I have ever eaten, and I have eaten ceviche in Lima.

Gold on the Walls

Sunset on the muralla — the fortress walls that encircle the old city — is not an event you attend. It is an event that happens to you, that absorbs you, that converts you from an observer into a participant in a ritual that Cartagena has been performing every evening since the walls were completed in the seventeenth century. You climb the stone ramp near the Clock Tower, find a section of wall wide enough to sit on, and you wait. Around you, the entire city appears to have had the same idea. Couples sit with their legs dangling over the outer wall. Teenagers pass bottles of aguardiente. A man sells cold beer from a cooler strapped to a bicycle. A woman sells mango with chilli and lime from a cart, each slice fanned out on a stick like a flower.

The sun drops toward the Caribbean and the light changes. The colonial buildings of the walled city, already colourful, begin to glow — the yellows deepen to gold, the whites warm to cream, the pinks flush to coral. The sea turns from blue to copper to a burnished orange that reflects the sky so perfectly the horizon line dissolves and the water and the sky become a single field of colour. A man produces a portable speaker and the music starts — not salsa this time but reggaeton, then cumbia, then champeta, the genres cycling through a playlist that the wall crowd receives as a DJ set, nodding and swaying and, eventually, dancing. On the wall. On the fortress walls of a city built to repel the English and the French and the pirates of the seventeenth-century Caribbean, people are dancing, and the dancing is not performance, it is not spectacle — it is simply what happens when the sun goes down and the sky turns gold and the beer is cold and the music is playing and you are alive and you are here and this city, this impossible, colourful, noisy, generous city, has decided to celebrate that fact.

The sun touched the water. The sky went from orange to pink to violet. The first stars appeared over the walled city. The music continued. Someone handed me a beer. I drank it on the wall with my feet dangling over the Caribbean and the city glowing behind me and the bass vibrating through four hundred years of stone, and I thought: this is what travel is for. Not the monuments or the museums or the carefully curated itineraries, but this — a wall, a sunset, a beer, a stranger's music, and the understanding that joy is not something you find. It is something a place gives you, freely, without asking for anything in return, because it has so much of it that keeping it all inside would be a kind of hoarding, and Cartagena does not hoard. Cartagena pours. Cartagena overflows. Cartagena paints its walls in colours that should not work and plays music that does not stop and dances on fortress walls at sunset and dares you, dares you, to sit still.