Colorful Cartagena, Colombia

Feel the beat in this pulsating Caribbean getaway

By Dianna Beaufort

On our first night strolling the streets, we were high-fived by a busload of revellers swinging past and nearly scooped up into the mayhem. Party groups are driven around town in colorfully painted chiva's, open-sided old school buses. Blasting tinny music is an integral part of the experience while the dancing on board sways the chassis of the chiva to the beat of Colombian salsa.

Cartagena is a bit of a party place. It's a common weekend getaway for people living in the capital of Colombia, Bogotá. Most stay in Bocagrande, a peninsula stretching out into the Caribbean Sea where hotel chains and high-rises dominate the skyline. If you're willing to depart from the sea (it's fairly grey here anyway), it's a much more attractive alternative to stay in the old city center. And if partying in a chiva isn't your kind of thing, then there's always a romantic horse and carriage tour. By far, however, the greatest pleasure comes from simply walking the streets.

The history, color and vivacity of Cartagena is sensational. At night the streets of the inner walled town glow like my childhood Light Bright screen: colors pop against the black sky. During the day, the sun intensifies the vibrant hues: cobalt blue adobe houses, hot pink hotels, pastel pink churches, white wooden balconies, deep mahogany doors and the bright yellow passageway of Las Bóvedas. These vaults in the northern corner of the city's walls were built as military storerooms and were also later used as jails. Today Las Bóvedas house shops selling an array of crafts. Though mostly geared to tourists, the leather, ceramics, clothes, Christmas decorations and jewellery are of high, hand-made quality.

Perhaps Colombia's most illustrious souvenir is the emerald. I imagined a poetic mix of blue skies and yellow sun making the emerald so green, but emeralds are big business here (remember Romancing the Stone?). It's wise to do your homework first since quality—that is to say: clarity—can be temporarily improved under the eye of a potential buyer. Beyond the product itself, the means of acquiring the stone is not something to be taken lightly. Emeralds come from deep mines in the mountains, and in the 1990's a ferocious ‘green fever' ripped apart the countryside as speculators disregarded the law and practically enslaved miners to get their goods.

Slavery is in fact what gave Cartagena its special advantage. In 1525 it became one of the first European settlements in the New World and obtained exclusive slave-trading rights. Today, you sense a deep awareness of their history and the mixed blood of Colombian ancestry, from the African street dancers to the statue is of India Catalina, a beautiful native Carib who was an interpreter to the Spanish. You can taste it too, in the comida criolla (Creole food).

Snacks carts with butifarras, smoky mini-meatballs, can be found all over. Plaza Santo Domingo is the most lively square with its café's serving up, of course, Colombian coffee. In its center lounges a voluptuous bronze Venus by Colombia's most famous artist Botero. It acts as a little reminder of how voluptuous you could get if you feasted on everything on offer, including arepas (egg wrapped in deep-fried corn pastry) and Colombianas, a sugary carbonated drink like the cream sodas of long ago.

Apart from restaurants and small-scale hotels, the streets panning out from Plaza Santo Domingo are full of small businesses, such as shoe shiners, tourist stalls, typists, buskers, mimes who may follow you for blocks and money changers who approach you on the street. Unidentified exchanges take place too, through the spindles of window balustrades.

After Cartagena's declaration of independence in 1810, the first settlement to do so, it rode on its reputation as the Heroic City for some time. Today its heroism has waned, but it remains full of gracious open plazas, elegant colonial structures and confident, entrepreneurial people. Everyone is a walking cell phone, selling calls for 250 pesos a minute. "Llamada, llamada," they shout as they traipse through town. Casual providers wear a cardboard "Llamada" sign around their neck and the more serious service providers have their territorial corners.

The old town feels like a village, with relaxed villagers helpful to each other and tourists. Cartagena may have a slightly seedy reputation among foreigners but it does not feel unsafe. Street commerce is a way of life, and so too, is music. Everywhere there is music in Cartagena's streets and always there are people swaying, tapping, gyrating to the beat, as though the streets are their living room. You get the sense here that they live life to live it joyfully. And whether you're swinging on a chiva or slow-dancing to the fully-equipped stereo in your hotel room (they all have one), you'll soon be pleasantly surprised that you have caught the fever.