A woman in a colorful, flowing dress carries a bowl of fruit on her head as she walks among the colonial mansions painted in pastel tones, some of them with so many flowers on the porch that they transform the entire street into a garden. An old bus through the city. Inside, a musical group plays rumba to entertain passengers who celebrate with a bottle of rum and coke. And, outside the walls, people queue to have their documents typed by typewriter near a flower shop. You forget that it’s the 21st century. This is just an ordinary day in Cartagena de Indias.
“You’re just a notary with no imagination at all,” a friend of Gabriel Garcia Márquez once said when the writer took him on a tour of Cartagena de Indias. Magical realism found fertile ground in the everyday absurdities of Latin America to flourish. But Cartagena is something else. Cartagena is the materialization of this fantastic universe, and García Márquez knew very well how to appropriate this atmosphere and shape it in his books.
The writer was born in Aracataca, a small town 250 kilometers from Cartagena, but had to move to the Caribbean city when, to escape a wave of violence and political turmoil that devastated Bogotá in the late 1940s, he was forced to transfer university. He spent only two years there, 1948 and 1949, when he dropped out of law school to dedicate himself to writing and journalism. Two years later, his family moved there, and he continued to visit the city in the years that followed. The short stay was enough to mark him and his work forever. “All my books have some loose ends in relation to some story that I saw or experienced in Cartagena”, the writer once said in an interview for a documentary.
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It was from one of these stories that the character Aureliano Buendía, from the acclaimed One Hundred Years of Solitude, was born. At the Camellion of the Martyrs, a pedestrian street located in the Getsemaní neighborhood, the writer spent hours talking with friends and listening to stories from fishermen and people recently arrived from other parts of Colombia. One day, someone told him about a general who had survived many wars. That’s it, the seed for a world classic was planted.
Despite the extreme connection between García Márquez’s work and the city, Cartagena does not seem to explore this glory very hard. The orange house that he kept until the end of his life, on a corner of the historic center, is closed and goes unnoticed if you don’t know what you’re looking for. The only museum dedicated to his work is in Aracataca, a place with no other major tourist attractions. And the only way to relive your days there or see, live and in color, some of the settings from your books, is by joining an agency tour or through independent research. Some corners, which may seem completely ordinary at first glance, reveal the magic captured by the author for those who, like him, know how to see.
Itinerary through Cartagena de Indias by Gabriel García Márquez
It is said that García Márquez received the spark of inspiration for “Love in the Time of Cholera” by observing the movement of city port, while noticing the mixture of Caribbean joy and melancholy that still existed in the city that was a landing port for people captured in Africa to become slaves in the Americas. Praça dos Gospels, where, in the book, the young girl Fermina Daza lives, is, in reality, the Fernandez Square in Madrid.
It was precisely in the white house, with a balcony on the second floor covered in vines, on the left corner of the square, that Florentino Ariza saw his beloved for the first time and began a story of love and rejection that lasted fifty years. Also in this square is the bench where the protagonist pretended to read a book while waiting for Fermina to pass by. According to the book’s own description, it was the most hidden bench in the square, in the shade of the almond trees.
Statue in the middle of Plaza Fernandez in Madrid (above) and the house where Fermina Daza supposedly lived, in the novel Love in the Time of Cholera (below).
Under the arches on the side of the Bolivar Square – the same ones where there is now a tribute to the many Colombian Miss Universes – he dictated the love letters he wrote to Fermina to the typists who, in the past, stayed there. Today, they were moved outside the walls of the historic center, near the entrance to the Clock Tower and next to a flower shop, still typing documents and, who knows, a letter or two from an incurable romantic. Far from just being the setting for a book, Plaza Bolívar was also one of the writer’s favorite places, who used to sit there to observe city life and think to himself. This is where the newly opened headquarters are located. Gabo Centera cultural space that offers courses and workshops aimed at journalists and writers.
The arches of Plaza Simón Bolívar (above) and the typists who still work outside the walls of the historic center (below).
A house on the corner of Calle Zerrezuela, refuge that the writer ordered to be built, is close to the limits of the historic center and facing the viewpoints from which you can see the sea. Nearby is the Bar El Coro, belonging to Sofitel Legend Santa Clara, which the writer liked to attend. Today a five-star hotel, the place was once a convent and still preserves the original facilities. When he worked as a reporter, Gabo was sent there to cover the discovery of a crypt deep below where the bar now stands, containing the remains of a girl who sported 70 feet of hair. This was the spark that later generated the story told in Of Love and Other Demons. Another example of how fantasy and reality mix in Cartagena.
Tourists pass in front of the house built by Gabriel García Márquez
Today, the bar is one of the trendiest in the city, has an excellent drinks menu and still preserves the somewhat morbid atmosphere of the convent. The crypt is open for visitors, just go down the small staircase located in the center of the room. Other establishments frequented by the writer on his bohemian nights were the Café Havanain the Getsemaní neighborhood, and the also Cuban La Vitrolaone of the most famous in the city.
Today a neighborhood in the process of gentrification, full of street art, cafes and galleries and art, the Gethsemanelocated outside the walls of the historic center, was, at the time of the writer’s visit to the city, a peripheral neighborhood that attracted him for its human wealth increased by the presence of immigrants from other parts of the country and fishermen who mingled in the bustling popular markets that he frequented to discover the stories of those people, a world completely different from the one he experienced within the limits of the aristocratic walled city.
The transformation of Getsemaní has changed the local atmosphere a lot, but that popular Cartagena that enchanted García Marquez still exists. At the Basurto Market, a popular market where you can find a bit of everything, in an illogical and, at the same time, fascinating confusion, you can also buy fresh fish directly from the fishermen, see a lady killing a chicken that, a few minutes before, was keeping her company several others in a cage and watch old men playing checkers. More or less the same environment that the writer loved to experience in the 1940s. The place is open every day in the Plaza de Mercado del Cartagena and, if you decide to go there, be careful with possible pickpockets.